


Gulfport: A British Petroleum Fanfic (Part Two)

by hw_campbell_jr



Series: Gulfport: A British Petroleum Fanfic [2]
Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Existentialism, Hipsters, Literature, M/M, Nostalgia, Original Character(s), Passive-aggression, Power Dynamics, Power Play, Psychological Drama, Psychological Trauma, Psychologists & Psychiatrists, Slash
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-09-15
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-14 06:46:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 38,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/512454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hw_campbell_jr/pseuds/hw_campbell_jr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Conditions are as they were in the first part: Mobile, Alabama, in 2010 against the backdrop of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Capitalism is present in this story about insecure, wealthy, white men in much the same manner that honey might be present in a story about bees. And this story is about power, in all of its (horrible) forms. </p><p>And again, “it is always from the depths of its impotence that each power center draws its power, hence their extreme maliciousness, and vanity.” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Capitalism and Schizophrenia: A Thousand Plateaus). And that is what happens in this story, in between all the expansive long-take nothing, constant hipsterism and the periodic sexing and angsting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Sort of Fifth Wheel to a Wagon

**Author's Note:**

> Heads up: the discussion of sex in this chapter is about as horrible as the actual sex in actual VC. One of the big problems with Anne Rice's work is the discussion of sexual & vampire acts that read as rape to me, yet either aren't named as such within her text, or are romanticized or apologized for. That's one of the things that Gulfport as a series is invested in arguing with. 
> 
> I mention that now because some of that is discussed in this chapter, and in consequence, if discussion of rape or dubcon is likely to be triggering to you, I don't recommend reading this chapter right now. To be clear, it's not the focus of the chapter, and is mentioned historically, but it is, and should be, your call. 
> 
> In this chapter, Lestat reads Moby Dick and Louis reads industry journals. And it's complicated.

A Sort of Fifth Wheel to a Wagon.

Sometimes, when I remember being in bed with Louis – not fucking necessarily, just being in bed with him, or being somewhere else with him that was like being in bed, somewhere alone, a contained space with room for just the two of us - the image I see of him is of his face, and of one movement. A small movement, in which his eyebrows come together in the slightest of knots, and his lips purse, as if he is thinking.

This is the face he makes when he’s troubled by me, I suppose. Or troubled by something. By something about driving the Porsche, I guess, because he wore it then (I should never have let him drive the Porsche). Or by British Petroleum, in the shower, after I’d pushed him off the bed, before going out, that time that I told you about. But mostly by me, I think. By me personally. Because his troubled face is my responsibility, and that is something I could never forget. It’s how he looked at session tonight, and I suppose it’s how he looks while he’s editing. Right now, as I’m writing, I anticipate that, I picture it.

I picture it, and I suppose that’s why I have to tell _you_ about it. Yes, buckle up, dearest. I’ve another chapter for you. I’ve got some more things to tell you, more things to ask of you, things you’ll doubtless wish I didn’t. Once more into the breach, my love! Once more set sail! You won’t like it, but it is, of course, required of you. “With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword;” as Herman Melville writes in _Moby Dick_ , and as you may tell yourself, “I quietly take to the ship.”

Alright, so this isn’t a ship, and it isn’t exactly quiet. I was trying to be literary, it didn’t entirely come off. But don’t complain. For one thing, I'm sick of it. For another, it won't make any difference. It’s a game now, or at least I’ve decided to respond to all of this writing as I would a game, just as I do when I tell myself that if I can make my therapist flinch, or grimace, then I may consider myself the winner of the session.

That’s not dissimilar to my process here, with you, writing this novel, playing your instincts for shock and amazement. I’m tired of courting you. It’s not a love relationship any more. Stay or go, it’s up to you. But whatever you choose, you should know that we’re playing now. And I know you’d never expect anything less of me, of course you’d never, but I’m playing to win. Just like Ahab. And I’m sure you remember how well that turned out.

If you do, then you’ve doubtless anticipated our theme for this evening’s chapter. It’s about time, too, isn’t it? Shouldn’t we have come to Great American Classics at this stage of our journey together? I should read _Moby Dick_ and make points about it,and Mark Twain ought to be next, really, or Dorothy Parker, since I’ve already done Judy Blume and Andy Warhol. It’s time to raise the intellectual stakes. I had read _Moby Dick_ before Louis gave it to me, of course, though by his reckoning, additionally of course, _of course_ he would say this, or at least imply it with his gaze, I’d never _really_ read it.

But just forget about Louis (as if that were possible). Forget Louis’ judgments. Melville is pertinent regardless. He is pertinent to me, and he is pertinent in other ways too, even if I’m sure Louis (I told you it wasn’t possible) didn’t quite intend him to be when he gave me the book. Just consider these lines:

“There is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts' honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair."

Yes, well. To employ the colloquial parlance, as my beloved ex-wife would have it, I see what you did there, Herman _._ That’s more than talking, surely. Surely they fucked. Surely they made out at least. Isn’t that what people did on boats? Isn’t that what everybody does when they encounter intimacy? Fuck each other a little, and probably ruin it? Would it spoil the story if they had, or, if your mind runs the way mine does about this kind of thing, if they hadn’t?

I wonder. Perhaps it was purely platonic, Ishmael and Queequeg entwining and holding each other, only as intellectual lovers. Perhaps it was as physical as a wrestling match, but the emotional intimacy was that much more important to Melville, and so it was emphasized. It’s impossible to tell from the phrasing, from the time period, from the novel, whether the issue is a non-event, or a non-disclosure. Perhaps it’s even intentionally impossible. And besides, whether they did or they didn’t, surely the entire discussion wants complication more than it wants a simple answer, don’t you agree? Because it’s complicated in general, isn’t it, sex?

Oh, it is. Don’t kid yourself about that. It’s true. It’s also universal. Leaving aside vampires (male vampires anyway) and our well-recognized difficulty with the kinds of sex that human men will traditionally do with each other, the shifting awkwardness in defining sex _anyway_ does tend to complicate things regardless. It will pose questions. It will require other terms besides fucking. Did they _really_ fuck, Ishmael and Queequeg? How much would it take for us to consider that they had? What about a hand-job, would that still be counted? One man’s fucking is another man’s foreplay, after all.

I’m not going to apologize for being vulgar. I’m playing to win, remember? And yes, we can do that too, you know, vampires. We can still use our fingers (and our tongues) for pleasure. We can still grab things. Don’t you remember _Memnoch: The Devil_? _Blood Canticle_? The last chapter of _Gulfport_? I can put appendages inside male bodies too, of course, even if traditionally, paperback publication will only allow me to speak about women (and perhaps that sheds a little light on Melville, and perhaps it doesn’t, but never mind). In short: sex, I can do it. It’s just complicated. But a lot of things about sex are complicated. And they are complicated in a lot of ways. Like the fact that Louis and I had never really done it before we started fucking each other in Mobile.

Close your mouth, dear, flies will get in. And I’m lying to you anyway. Of course I’m lying. I just wanted to see what you’d do.

Well.

I’m sort of lying.

Because it’s complicated, isn’t it, as I’ve said? Because sex is always complicated, and believe me, I know. First and foremost, I know because I am a writer who has tried (is trying) to write about it, but more than that, I know because I am, in fact, _actually a_ _person_. Humanness aside – it’s not only humans - part of being a person is having to think about fucking. You should know that, even if you never do it. And you’ll know too, if you’ve read Louis’ memoir, that it’s entirely possible for two people to fuck without anybody saying that fucking is what it is.

Oh, how I picture his troubled face when I write that! Yes, Louis. I see. I see what you did there too.

You remember that. You remember _Interview with the Vampire_ , that dreary little exercise of Louis and Daniel’s, recorded while flirting at each other across a grimy table, and transcribed into a paperback (yes, a paperback. So fuck you, Louis, pun very much intended). You remember what Louis said in it, and what I said afterwards. But I doubt you remember any explicit description of the ways we touched each other, or the things we did with each other when we were alone. This is Louis after all. He’d no more speak to a stranger about fucking than he would

well, actually he did speak about it to Daniel a little bit. Sometimes I picture that too, when he says the part about trying to explain sex if you’d never had it. I know what the suggestion of indelicacy looks like on Louis. It looks devastating. He’s an accidental Melville! Or, an intentional one. It’s difficult to tell. And it’s complicated.

It is also complicated by some strange, artistic honesty, which compels me to admit to you that I’m probably losing at therapy. The score is not so far in my favor anyway, Louis’ face aside. The therapist’s embarrassment remains a white whale of unharpoonable composure, while my own efforts to rattle him become increasingly, pathetically, impotent in response. Nothing even really happened when I broke Louis’ fingers tonight.

Oh yes. Yes, I broke Louis’ fingers. All of the fingers on his right hand, and though they healed quickly, I still broke them. I know because I heard it – breaking bones are a fairly distinctive sound. That’s a winning move, isn’t it? Or it should be. But I wasn’t even really In Trouble with either of them for doing that. Once Louis was done wincing, everybody just sighed. And then Louis made that face. Always that face.

Oh, that face. That pointed, white face, with its ability to collapse the world against us, to make us the only two people in the world. In bed, in the office, in the car, in the shower. I told you I remembered it in the shower, didn’t I tell you that? This was that night I tossed him out of bed, onto the floor. And drove him to the beach, remember that? We were going to go to the movies, but then we weren’t anymore, and I had to drive him across state lines because our own coast wasn’t close enough. And they talk about Helen of Troy’s face launching ships, but they don’t say what expression she was making at the time - that might have changed the story, if she were wrinkling her brow as Louis did. Pursing his lips. Closing us in together, in this wet, steamy closet, with so, so much outside of it. Terrible things.

Terrible things. Deepwater Horizon. The rig explosion. The spill. You remember. The sea was black and it was coming for us. “There are underwater plumes,” Louis said. “There’s a kill-zone of some 80 square miles on the sea-floor. It will devastate shrimping in the gulf, mark my words, and the damage to the wetlands is severe. Particularly in Louisiana, and they haven’t recovered from Hurricane Katrina.”

I was soaping his body while he was saying this. His little white ass was pressed against me, firm, and it was distracting me, though I knew that because I was certainly In Trouble with him, I had to keep concentrated on his mind anyway. My own closeness made no difference to him. It had no influence on his manner at all. Louis has a dignified nakedness, as he has a dignified everything, and his slim hands were folded under his chin like neatly stacked linens. It was as if we were somewhere else than under a shower, with water flattening his hair until it was as black and as shiny as the disaster he was talking about.

But “what are you reading?” I’d teased him, kissing him, lifting his wet hair to kiss his neck, which he neither resisted, nor acknowledged. “Environmental journals? What? How do you know these things?”

“The paper,” he’d said. “That’s all. Just the paper. Well, the _Press-Register_ and the _Times-Picayune_. And _Scientific American_ and _National Geographic_. And the Eastern papers and the _Wall-Street Journal_ of course, but their coverage has largely concerned Kevin Costner.”

“Excuse me?”

He had turned around then and taken the soap out of my hands. “And the _Press-Register_ – far-seeing as ever - is tending to emphasize false litigants in the BP settlement.” Oh, talk about the _Press-Register_ some more, Louis, I wanted to say. Nothing’s more interesting than your part-time job at the local paper.

But “what about Kevin Costner?” I’d said instead, because my thoughts were interrupted by his hand, which had shifted, and begun to move over me. He rubbed the soap between his own hands, and, turning to face me, slipped against my skin, rubbing the lather against my chest.

“Stephen Baldwin is suing him,” Louis had told me. “Something to do with shares in an oil separating technology. You read it, if you’re interested.”

I said nothing.

“I must say that I am starting to rather loathe British Petroleum,” he continued. “Did I tell you what they’ve done in Colombia?”

“I don’t want to know about Colombia,” I had said, unaware that this would be only night one of Louis the environmentalist, and that not only would I eventually hear about Colombia (two nights later!), but about Royal Dutch Shell and Nigeria too.

“Alright,” he’d said (then), not seeming to notice the way he was touching me and what it was doing. But he did notice. It was intentional, rest assured. Given the context, given our earlier exchange in which I had wronged him, I’m certain that it was. Over my chest, the side of my neck, my left arm, he ran his hands, and his touch was as light as it was expert, acknowledging nothing. His coldness was my punishment. How right Melville is about that; “truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast.”

“But we’ll be here,” he said. “There’s no getting around that. We’ll live through it – industrial pollution, Peak Oil, Climate Change. This is where we will be.” 

I hated him for that sometimes, for his assured way of speaking about these things, as if he were simply, unquestionably, and of course morally, right. Especially while he was fondling me. It felt pointed.

“So what if we do?” I’d said. “I don’t even eat shrimp. Oh please, Climate Change.”

“Like _Blade Runner_ ,” Louis said, “don’t you ever think about that? That it will happen, and we will experience it, completely unable to die.”

“How needlessly morbid,” I had told him scornfully, teasingly, trying to play with him. Trying to seem as if I were playing with him. “Darling,” I had said, “don’t you know that you are making yourself miserable? The future is the future, and Ridley Scott is awful. _Blade Runner_ is dreary. It’s bullshit that Armand likes, I’m not interested.”

“The book is different,” he’d said. “ _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_. It’s Phillip K. Dick, there’s an interesting treatment of religion, the manipulative power of suffering.”

He spoke contemplatively about that, as if it were information he was just then realizing might be interesting. It was a change in tone. I decided to look up at him. His eyes were wide. 

“I also like _Alien_ ,” he said.

“That’s because you think there is a monster inside you,” I’d said, kissing his mouth, clasping my hands around his back. Gently. Very gently. “ _Alien_ is for people who won’t admit that they are the monster.”

But Louis didn’t notice, or didn’t wish to show that he had noticed, that I had kissed him. Or kissed him again.

“You liked _Gladiator_ ,” he’d insisted, as if it were somehow important.

“I liked Russell Crowe.” 

Louis frowned. This was my first modern encounter with Melville, actually. That’s probably why I’ve remembered this moment so strongly. Because Louis gave me this book tonight, and back then, he quoted him, and I remember it because I remember I knew he was quoting something, but I didn’t recognize the source. His face, and that minor stab of embarrassment stayed with me. I filed it away, and it burned there, like some strange pre-recognition, waiting for its shipmate. “In this world, shipmates,” Louis said, “sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without a passport; whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers.”

Stab. “What’s that from?” I’d asked. Another kiss. Tightening my arms, pulling him close under the water. “Not _Gladiator_.”

“ _Moby Dick_.”

“About the whale?”

“There’s a whale in it, yes.”

“What else is in it?”

“Rage,” Louis said. “And hubris.” He turned his head away from me, reaching out for the faucet. “And questions about what it means to, and whether or not you can have, or take, power over your environment.”

His hand moved lightly, as thoughtlessly over the rest of the world as it had done over me. Without seeming to notice what he was doing, wearing that same troubled expression, he turned off the shower, and the steam began to subside. I felt a deep tenderness for him, though I admit it was tinged with a mild irritation.

“What are you thinking, chéri?” I asked. He bit his lip. Looked up at me. 

“I want to see it. I want to see the oil on the water.”

So I drove him. Naturally, I drove him. And eventually, fucking.

Yes, fucking. Absolutely, definitely fucking, no question about that at all. But you remember that there is a question somewhere, don’t you? You must be wondering about it. How much of a lie did I tell you in my opening lines? Did we fuck before Mobile, or didn’t we? Well, as I say, it’s complicated.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. This is Louis’ complication far more than it is mine. I require no such coyness, and can happily (if not gleefully) remind you that in the nineteenth century, Louis and I lived together for sixty-five years. We had a child together, as you’ll recall. _Of course_ we fucked. _Of course_ we did. Not to mention the fact that in the twentieth century, we reunited after a seeming eternity of separation, and by God we made up for lost time. He made promises, I saw that he kept them. What do you think this is here? _Moby_ _No_ _Dicks_? Of course we fucked.

Except. Except that there’s more to Louis’ non-disclosure than his broken fingers or his puritan scruples. We fucked and he wouldn’t tell about it, but he also wouldn’t tell about it because in another way, we didn’t fuck. What I mean to fill in here is a missing part: the fact that he didn’t want my power in his environment, and that because of this, after I made him, except in one or two very specific circumstances, he wouldn’t drink my blood.

Alright, so maybe this part is particular to vampires - I won’t go back on my universalism; everybody fucks, or thinks about it, and it is always complicated - but this part is particular to us. To vampires. Vampires, I said! Vampires which are, as you must know, you _must know_ , are blood drinking, undead creatures of the night. Please let me underscore _blood drinking_ , won’t you? That’s important. Blood is the best part of it, the best part of everything, it is the part that makes it intimacy and oblivion, whether you drain someone or you love them, either or both. And that was the thing he wouldn’t do with me in that long ago time in the nineteenth century, when we did it. Until things changed, as they did in Mobile, and in Gulfport, and once before that, he didn’t want my power and he wouldn’t drink my blood. So I wonder, as he must wonder. Does it count as fucking or just foreplay? It’s complicated.

I wonder this about Louis, still. When he’ll sit now, in session, motionless and refuse to react as I tell it, and tell it again, I always wonder. He’s made his comment on the matter, and he is done, and I wonder if he expects his conduct to speak for him. I wonder if some part of him still sees fucking as an equivalent sin to killing, and expects me to accept that I should always have known this. The concepts have blurred together in the blood, and in his speech, and I feel stupid and ungainly every time he speaks (or doesn’t speak) about it. Killing and fucking, gratifying desire, as if all of those things were terrible, and still are, no matter the things he said to me during that brief, lucid period during which they were not. And things in general. Materialism. “Things” in that sense too.

Oh, but that’s complicated too, isn’t it? I got home from session tonight, with a book he gave me, and I read it from cover to cover, and now I write, and it’s so visible in this exchange, the way he feels about me; having me wound him, then giving me a gift, wanting me to think about Ahab (or possibly Ishmael – would it presume too high an opinion of my intellect to consider that perhaps he also wants me to consider how much is inflected in the gap between narrator and tragedy? Probably). So the gift is barbed, and I bleed from it, because it’s not a kind comparison, and there’s no such thing as a free book. At least not if I read him right; what you call fate is actually your own hubris, but hubris is its own fate, or narrative. But it’s also about him, I think, because the book has a price sticker on it, something he would have noticed, but may have forgotten to remove. Did he notice that it was bought and paid for? I don’t know about this! I don’t know anything!

Maybe it’s that – I don’t know anything. The whale isn’t seeking you, Lestat, so stop looking for it. Maybe he’s trying to tell me that there’ll never be any understanding between us, that the sea is wider than my comprehension, and that he is that sea, that he washed away in Gulfport with our blood, that I’ll never be sure whether any of it was really fucking. You know that moment when Ahab meets the other captain, the other captain who was damaged by the whale? Well, that almost makes sense of it. That ship’s doctor tells Ishmael that this other captain has accepted it, that he’s not devastated, that there’s no vengeance quest from anyone but Ahab. Because you can’t conquer the world, because sometimes you get the whale, and sometimes the whale gets you, and sometimes it’s sex and sometimes it isn’t, and if you won’t let go you will stain the whole sea with oil, because all of the sea is

Because all of the sea is fucking each other, Lestat? Really? I don’t know. I give up. It’s a terrible metaphor, I should never have started it. I’m too stupid for literature. I’m too stupid for every book Louis has ever given me, and for everything he says. I can respond to things only physically, and it’s sex or it’s violence, but I’ll respond physically. You can take the illiteracy out of the boy, but you can’t

Oh, I don’t know. You can’t do anything. 

Listen to me anyway. You have to listen, someone has to. Listen to what I’m telling you! Ahab can’t listen, that’s what I’m trying to convey. He can’t hear the other captain, and he can’t hear Ishmael. He’s so angry, so offended, that he spins on the deck to walk away from it all, and he moves so quickly that he fractures his substitute leg. Breaks it. It’s broken a second time, broken even without the whale, just the memory of the whale and fact that he has failed to recover from it. And that’s me, obviously. Obviously. That’s what he intends to say. Without saying it, of course. Check yourself before you wreck yourself. But in literary terms.

But I can’t. Whether I can’t speak truth, or I can’t listen to it, I can’t tell you. All I can tell you is that Louis, and the therapist’s, refusal to be honestly appalled by my being angry makes me feel a kind of anger I cannot contain. I broke Louis’ fingers tonight! What else do I have to do to prove how monstrous I really am! He tried to touch me, tried to comfort me, and I broke every finger on his right hand, instantly, with one quick movement and no regrets. Shouldn’t that tell them that I am a real danger? 

It doesn’t. The therapist told me off, of course, but it didn’t mean anything, it wasn’t a real chastisement, it wasn’t a condemnation, he didn’t consider the story ended. I still had to work. No matter how many times I tell them what happened in me, how many times I show them how easily it can happen, how essential it is to the very accident of my being, it never gets any clearer to them and it’s never resolved. Louis’ eyebrows come together, his lips purse, and I, all I have out of any of this, is complication. Endless complication, endless rage.

I admit that it’s possible that this particular rage is the origin of my piling such a sum of it, and hate, upon you in this retelling of things; because I want a reaction from you, and a better reaction than that! My own (unbroken) fingers are a mortar, the vehicle by which my hot heart’s shell may burst upon you. Because I want you to see me, really see me, for who I really am, which is monstrous. Take some unfiltered honesty, here, where I am winning. Call Me Lestat.

There, you see? I am winning. I win merely by being the perspective character (and in this sense I _do_ differ from Captain Ahab, and so there). There’s an inevitability to that. Eventually, everybody, including the therapist, will see everything from my perspective. He’ll understand about Louis and what he represents to me. Perhaps then, he’ll love me in spite of it.

Oh, I shouldn’t say that, I know. I ought not to get confused about it, because this fellow is only doing his job, which is to be mildly and calmly compassionate to terrible creatures, rather than to hunt them and to blame them as I do. But I am taken in by it, of course I am. I’m a sucker for Paternal Figures, I always was. If I resent myself a little for being so taken in, so what? Perhaps there’s something to his expectation that I myself should be able to navigate the deficiencies he sees in me? No! Never! I will break a thousand fingers before he’ll catch that whale.

First, I want him to admit that I am not as pedestrian as he says I am. For I am _not_ like everybody else, but rather my particular emotional frailties are special to me and me only, are narrative, and cannot be treated with simplistic exercises and “working on it”. It’s not only “difficulty with intimacy” and “disproportionate anger,” and “unprocessed trauma” and abundant, confusing uses of the terms “anxiety” and “fear” - it is, or it should be, that I’m the most difficult and tragic case he’s ever seen in his long career! A total monster. A lost cause. I met _The Devil_ , darling. _The Devil_. Can it really be possible that I am not crazy enough to impress upon my therapist that none of this, and yet all of this, is my fault?

I don’t know. _I’m_ not a therapist, and I can’t read his damned mind, either. He is powerful. He is someone who would probably be sinister, if it were at all possible for anyone to be sinister at, or to, me. It’s not. Yet I don’t have any answers. I’m just a vampire who broke some fingers and who is additionally attempting to break some bad habits in that regard. A vampire who neither got laid nor killed anybody tonight, and is for some reason (sort of) quoting Melville, and speculating about historical fucking that did, or didn’t happen in books. _Moby Dick_ , and _Interview with the Vampire_.

Honestly. Consider this: 

What would Christ need to have done to make me follow him like Matthew or Peter? Dress well, to begin with. And have a luxurious head of pampered yellow hair.” 

That’s Louis’, of course. From his book. And my notebook, because it is written in most of them, like a prayer at the front, so that I may remind myself. And what do you think he was doing telling you about all of that, besides taunting me? Why would any writer do that? And Louis, why would he care what you thought of him? No, I was meant to read it, I knew it at the time, and I know it now, and so does he.

Unfortunately, he also intends that I read the very next line:

“I hated myself,” he writes, or says, while Daniel is recording, or typing, or whatever the fuck Daniel does. That’s the next thing Louis says to him. He says (and I paraphrase), “I miss you, Lestat, and consequently I hate myself.”

I’d love to assume that the comment was meant to imply that he hated himself for what he did to me, as I did when I first read it, because I hadn’t seen him in ages and I wanted to believe what I believed. But I know him better than that by now, and really, I knew him better than that even then. Loving me makes him hate himself, it always did. Loving me is _symbolic_ of his hating himself. I am a sickness, and so his troubled face is both my responsibility, and something I cannot help. As he has said.

Repeatedly. Repeatedly, repeatedly, until it is the background music to our marriage, an spreading, indelible oil-stain on the fabric of our unlives. “I hate myself for loving you,” as the saying goes. Saying. It’s from a Bob Dylan song. Fucking Bob Dylan. Fucking Louis! How can you hate to love someone so much?

No, I’m serious. Shouldn’t that actually be impossible, the depth of my feeling, of his? Except that the sensations themselves are equivalent in weight and value, and I do know that, I know. I know too that what I said to him in the parking lot tonight was driven by revenge, and that he knew it, and that perhaps he knew this other part too, about equivalence, because he was pressing the book into my hands with his left, the right one curled away from me even though it had almost healed. Defensive, definitely, slightly defensive about the hand. But not properly afraid of me. No, not properly afraid of me at all.

He should be. He should be terrified of what I’m going to do, of the ways in which I will destroy him. I should tear up this book right now. His, and all of those he’s given me, and it will be symbolism, symbolic destruction, because then I will fall to my own hubris, weeping into these pages, marring them with my blood. But I don’t. I don’t do that, and I type instead, driving for accuracy, driving to order the world. I will stain everything with ink the color of oil. And I don’t know why. I used to talk to him about this and he’d listen, but now there is only silence, in which I find myself looking over the top of my laptop, out of the window, to Mobile Bay. Cars race indefinitely along the coast there, against the infinite background of the hills, and the blackened sea. They are speeding toward their own destruction. You cannot halt that, darling. Hubris is its own fate, its own narrative. Listen to me, I know. Listen!

But you know this story, about when Louis and I were younger men (or sort of. You know what I mean), when our little girl was (for argument’s sake) young and innocent, and all of the worst times were still ahead of us. You probably don’t know that most nights, before dawn, he’d lie against me and let me stroke his lithe, angular body, because that isn’t in the book. But he would. And he’d let me kiss him, and I would. I would kiss him and kiss him and then I would drink from him, carefully, brushing his hair aside and sinking my teeth into his neck as if it were something fragile and impossibly precious. I would do this, I would pet him and then fuck him, and he would let me do it, and sometimes he would cry. His tears would burn and break my heart and still I’d do it. I’d feed and feed and I’d feel for him until something in it would turn and I would begin to loathe him. That’s how it was, every time. __

Okay, maybe not _every_ time - sometimes, when I bit him, he would mew like a kitten and sometimes, he would clasp my hand or my thigh out of some strange desperation. Sometimes he couldn’t pretend he didn’t like it, and I had to know that he did. But the important part is the same regardless; that it felt, that it always felt, as if he were letting something terrible happen. As if – exactly as if - he was _letting me_. __

So I know _._ The therapist can say what he likes, but I know. Louis has already told me what I am, and he cannot take it back; I am a force of nature. I am hubris itself, an unstoppable evil, against whom Louis cannot act. How he measures himself against me in that! Even as he tells me that I am responsible, responsible for everything, for all of this, for everything I’ve done. A pedestrian actor, no destiny, no fate. The whale isn’t looking for me, I am looking for it. This is what is so damned confusing about the book and the fingers, don’t you see that? Because Louis – Louis! – blames me where he wants to and forgives me where he doesn’t, and God! There is _no fucking consistency between any of these things._

Except that there is. There is. Historically. In the first few years he’d only drink from animals, you must remember that, and it was a great existential crisis because only life and death mattered, but he was also petty, also loudly embarrassed by my ostentation, as if it mattered, and as if were somehow an act of deliberate willfulness that I preferred to dress well, and to enjoy things that had been made to be enjoyed. And then he missed me for it, in his book, and you must know how angry that made me to read! That he hated himself for missing me, because I was evil. Well, I proved that tonight, just as he wanted me to. After all, as Melville puts it, “better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.”

Yes, well. I wonder if that, my evil, is how Louis justified owning a plantation.

Oh, but that’s cruel. That’s too cruel, it’s a body blow. He didn’t know any better, then. Oh, how the movement of history has altered his understanding of some very specific things. Because he’ll drink my blood now, or he would before all of this new horror happened. Because he’ll use products now, technology, the little macbook that I bought him, and the phone, sometimes, and the clothes and the television and the car and the electricity bill that he always forgets about. Only back then, he wouldn’t touch anything, because he was pure except in his tacit commitment to slavery (it was just too much for him to think about, too much outside of his realm of understanding), and he managed the money because it was abstract and I managed the things because they were real. I always managed the things for him.

He won’t let me now. He’s more devoted to his marriage to independence than he ever was to me, but I wonder about all of this. These new skills and abilities he has, and his little career writing book reviews, and his apartment, and car registration. I wonder if all of these are just Louis going over, as he goes over, because something about Louis is that when he goes over, he really goes. Remember that when I met him, he’d sunk into utter despair and degradation, and he did it through vice and spending, and that’s exactly what I mean when I wonder if perhaps there is a consistency after all. Perhaps this is all the same thing. Perhaps he’s acting as the New Pope says we are all acting, by consorting with industry, as members, as voices, in the chorus of Legion. Because Deepwater Horizon was “worse than Valdez Sound,” he’d begun, then, that night in the shower before we he driven to Gulfport. He had made that same expression, the one that I always remember. He had talked about oil, and then, then he had made me drive with it.

Me. I had to drive. I’m the one driving. But I always drive, so which one of us was acting intentionally? Was that the night that it had first become his particular bête noire, had he already stopped caring about the two of us? Or did our minor exchanges on the matter so far mean that it happened already, were we already jetsam on the ocean of narrative fate?

Whatever. It doesn’t matter. His expression. That’s the face I remember. That’s the night that I noticed it. That night that dry, and dressed, I had driven him to Gulfport. He was dressed like a college student, in blue jeans and that green flannel shirt. And we had stared out over the ruined sea, and we had fucked, on a beach, as I’m sure you remember. It was definitely fucking, no question about that. I heard about Colombia only two nights later, and at my own behest, so it was bought and paid for, and it was fucking.

But really, even then, how different was any of that then, to any of it in the long ago, those times in which I would drink his blood out of his body, and he wouldn’t drink mine? His body was so white and so fine that when I bled him I always felt I was soiling it. Especially when I’d pin him beneath me, utterly passive, staring into my eyes in total submission, and I would consider that if I were to soil him, I might as well soil my own soul as not. Peeling him out of his clothes I’d see this, even when I’d already bitten through them and the blood was smeared, how rich it was on his skin, how much he deserved to be wounded, as he had always deserved it. How much he deserved to be marked by me. I only wished he’d put his hands upon me in return. Sometimes he would. Sometimes he wouldn’t. It never mattered to what I did to him.

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Can’t you read between the lines at all? How much more explicit do you need me to be? Alright, take the blunt truth: I raped him. That’s what we were coming back from. That’s why it was so difficult. Louis infuriated me, Louis humiliated me, he made me ashamed of myself, and sometimes, sometimes, back then, before he burned me and left me, I would overpower him, I would hold him down, and I would hurt him, and force him to respond to me. That was the price. Breaking his fingers was nothing. Unless, on a minor scale, it is the same thing: he touched me, and I broke him. I can’t help myself. I never could.

Yes, I know how that sounds. Don’t you join in the responsibility chorus. Both of them say I’m refusing to take full responsibility for what happened to Louis in Gulfport, but that’s because not all of the responsibility is mine. And you’re my audience. And I am trying to shock you, yes, but you should have anticipated that. You should have taken note of those other times, when we’d fight openly. When we’d say horrible things to each other. And then we’d press up against each other in various states of undress. We’d thrust our hands into each other’s folds and hollows, we’d fondle each other and have angry, passionate touch-ups, throwing each other about like actors in some parody porn film, kissing each other as if we meant to wound. Afterwards, he’d cry about that too, but then, he cried about everything. He was far worse than I ever was about crying, not even crying because everything was so significant, but because it was tragic and awful and oh! so poetically bereft. He’d cry until I hit him, and he meant me to do that, because he deserved it, but that was inevitably my fault as well. Poor Louis.

Poor, poor, manipulative Louis.

Yes, I said it. I won’t apologize for it either. I noticed tonight that he has taken to looking directly at me while I speak in session. He used to look away, and now he looks, and I know he does it because he hopes it will make me uncomfortable enough to stop, uncomfortable enough to admit wrongfulness. It doesn’t. His right hand will, I hope, remember this lesson. But perhaps he anticipated that, and perhaps, I think, he anticipates I’ll call to apologize. I won’t. I will, however, steal glances at the book all night long, as if it were about to do something besides lie there beside my keyboard being a novel. He’s given it the power to chastise or accuse me, or is that all my own doing? I can’t figure that out, and he doesn’t intend me to. I know that. I know it absolutely. You should know too, incidentally, and if you don’t, then you don’t know him at all.

Though that’s probably more my fault than it is yours. I want to try to explain this about him, always, the particular contradiction that is Louis, but I always fall short with it, and I am more aware of that than you know. I told you in the last chapter that I’d forgotten to consider his looks, but this I don’t forget, I just don’t know how to translate it. Fastidious and filthy, that description that I gave of him chapters ago, that’s true, it’s almost there, but it isn’t the heart of the thing, it’s just a placeholder. Because there’s more to Louis than his behavior and his mannerisms - his wagon has a fifth wheel, his soul, his punishment.

Do I do a blasphemy when I suggest that a soul is a punishment? Let me phrase it like this for you: if there is a monster in Louis, it was there from the beginning, long before I did anything. Furthermore, it is a monster that hates him as much as it ever did me. It’s something that lives in him, spoiling his thoughts, pouring him out over and over in infinite combinations of conflict and uncertainty, emptiness and moral absolute. Because it wasn’t only the power he didn’t want, he also didn’t want to take pleasure from it. I was never sure which was the greater, and I’m still not. It’s easy to imagine that Louis’ poor, Catholic wagon wheel was less troubled by becoming a better monster than it was by having a body and enjoying it, but it’s just as easy to imagine that Louis, my Louis, would be able to amplify a minor intellectual objection into an entire way of life. Probably, honestly, it was a confusion of the two. He was certainly very confused tonight.

I think it pains him, I honestly do. More than anything I could have done, more than anything else he’s suffered. I think, honestly, what has happened to him in his endless existence hurts him considerably less than what he is. And I don’t mean what he became after I killed him, and I don’t mean what happened to him in Gulfport, or what I did tonight. I mean what he _is_. Oh, he’d been so desperate and so decadent when I met him, drinking and gambling and carousing with sex workers (they’re called sex workers now. You’re not supposed to say whore, though Louis does). He was heartbroken, and thoughtless, and drunk and indecorous and wounded by the world, and I thought, what a passionate creature, what a deep, black, river, what a sensitive thing. But that was symbolic decline, wasn’t it? As I say, when he goes over, he really goes. All with Louis is symbolism. That’s why he likes Melville so much. His passion is real, but it’s also not really passion.

I know how that sounds too. Am I winning yet? Have I caught you? Are you finding it all appalling, or is it still romantic to you? Is it romantic that Louis, in the language that everybody likes now, that Louis has problems? That he’s always had problems, he’s always teetered on the knife edge of what the therapist has since revealed to us is called chronic depression? I was unsurprised at that diagnosis. Because believe you me, my dear, he was fucking depressing to live with. And I tried! I really did. I did love him! I didn’t make that up.

I suppose I understand if you don’t believe me. And I suppose I understand if you still find it romantic. Depressives are romantic, which I suppose explains the extent to which they have littered my life (even Delford is depressive. I could have figured that out had I paid any attention, but I didn’t notice until I sucked an undercurrent out of his neck last night, something strange and metallic and calming. He doesn’t know how I knew to ask, I told him I saw a change in his behavior, but it is fluoxetine, in very high dosage. A new prescription. My poor darling. I suppose I’m responsible for that too). And at the very least there was a certain amount of bohemian intensity between Louis and I. It was just – and believe me, I find this almost as bitterly funny as you do – it was an intensity that until recently had tended to remain, and has recently again become, unculminated. It’s complicated, as I keep telling you. It’s complicated.

It’s complicated, and you owe it to me to listen to that complication. “Now, I'm getting into the coffin,” he claims I said, “and you will get in on top of me if you know what's good for you,” and I did! I did! I did say that! But you must know he wanted me to! He claims he got in passively, but that’s only how he likes to play it. His passivity is his strength, and you must know that too, since he bothered to remember it! Since he let me break his fingers, since he gave me a gift! If I’d made him to be my conscience, then he had accepted because he wanted the punishment.

Well, I remember it too. Everything dark and close, his head on my shoulder, his body against mine, his hand curled into mine in tender, desperate submission. Even in the dark, I could see his expression. My heart met my throat when he made it. I’m not even sure it was totally conscious. Other times, I was sure it was. When we went out, sometimes. Sometimes in an unseen space, alone even when surrounded as if the world had collapsed against us, I’d be sure. Sometimes, in some moments, there was a gesture, a kiss, that made me think that everything had been forgiven. But then that face would come and it would be so complicated. I should have known better. Should have taken note. Because no matter what changed here, in this city in Alabama, nothing had really changed, and nor would it.

And I know that so _intimately._ You know, I wasn’t prepared for how much of this new rage was historical. Most of this has been tabled now, what I’ve just told you, but here it is again as if we never addressed it, as if we never made peace, never worked through it. As if the last year didn’t happen, as if it was all imagined, and there were no confessions and no declarations, and really, really, we are still back in the nineteenth century, bleeding each other dry in an endless, repetitive loop. Then meeting each other at a concert, in a coffin where he’s burned himself, in a Waffle House in Alabama, beginning again and again and again. We talk tonight, and he gives me a book and I drive home on fossil fuels, dressed in petroleum byproducts, but only the world outside me has changed. Only you change. We don’t. We can’t. We never have. We are fixed here. Always navigating to the far-off star of a bloody trauma.

So let me attempt to uncomplicate it by telling it you in the simplest of possible terms; Louis and had I fucked, alright. In our old life, in the old days, we had fucked to beat the band. It’s just that we had never fucked to mutual climax, and we had inevitably fucked in ways that were mutually horrendous. For our tenure, for the most part, until we initiated things in this new city, we had done a continuous, cyclic dance of refusal and daring and awfulness, and neither of us had really realized how terrible it was until we were called on it in session.

The therapist’s original comment on the situation I shall remember always. This came after Louis had been coaxed into describing everything, in that cautious, euphemistic way of his, and the therapist had done that contemplative thing that he tends to do (he steeples his hands, like a caricature, I think they all learn that somewhere at some secret therapist’s college) and then had said, “frankly, that sounds frustrating for both of you.”

Louis had gone quiet. I set my face to mock, and I swear I would have done it, but then Louis had said, furtively and aggressively, as if by complete accident, “it was!” and I was utterly taken aback.

Really. I was almost physically thrust against the couch by those words. This was months ago, this session. It was 2010, and things were better, or beginning to get better, and it was before they got worse again. After we had spent a week doing something that both of us _knew_ had been fucking, but before both of us realized that even when that part of it is clear, it can still be complicated. So we’d had this conversation. We’d had this revelation. It was stunning.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been so to you, but it was to me. As bad as it had sounded, hearing Louis explain it as he had, even writing about it my own self, I’d had no earthly idea that this was how he felt about it. I had suspected him of every sin, every malice, every deficiency of character, but never this. It had never occurred to me to think, never even once crossed my mind, that he, like any ordinary person, could be unhappy in this particular way. And then, all of a sudden, he said so, and I was forced to acknowledge that it was possible that he did.

“It was!” he said. It was frustrating, and he was frustrated! Alright, obvious maybe, rather than possible.

Yet you have to understand that even this minor moment of clarity came only after fourteen thousand dollars of therapy (I told you it was expensive), two-hundred years of on-and-off Kind-Of-Fucking (I told you it was arduous), and enough emotional torment for me to be entirely secure in the fact that this was what we were going to do to each other, forever (and ever), until the sun consumed the earth and we both burned to death or lived burning. That was how it was. That was how it had always been, and would always be. All things being equal, this bullshit with Louis was probably just slightly more frustrating for me.

And then he’d said that! And then there was this! This, “I’d like to do it with you,” and “you have sexual hang-ups,” and “I think you preferred it when I resisted you and you tried to rape me.” And of course I didn’t prefer it! I simply _knew where I stood then_ , for fuck’s sake Louis, you impossible, contradictory monster! If I may depart from referencing great literature in order to cherrypick something a little more contemporary, Spinal Tap knew what they were singing about when they opined, “you know where you stand in a hell-hole.”

Thus, you’ll forgive me for the fact that his revelation took time for me to understand. You already read some of that, my staggered progress toward comprehending his particular awkwardness, and toward compensating for it. You already know that eventually we learned to fuck properly, enjoying the mutual exchange of fluids – in fact, I believe we have covered that topic extensively. And now, you know that we’d never really done it before, not counting the times he’d forced my hand in it (you remember that. Don’t you? That Louis attempted suicide, Louis _committed_ suicide, and I wasn’t even sure I could bring him back? What the Hell else was I supposed to do other than force him to drink from me? But I can’t write about that yet. It’s too – and I swear I tried for a better word before settling on this one, but – it’s just simply too fucked up). In short, you know what we did, and now you know some of why it was complicated.

I might have saved some time by being able to admit that to Louis directly. I couldn’t, of course, and you shouldn’t have expected it of me. But we did talk about it eventually, because, and I quote a second time, “there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends.” Isn’t it interesting that this has come up again? Yes, it’s not only complicated but complex - that’s literature! Observe: there is no place like a bed, my friend, even if sometimes that confidential disclosure concerns the fact that, due to its myriad complications, one is somewhat awkward about sex.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I remember I drove us home after that session, and I remember it felt good to be driving, wearing Raybans and a leather jacket, playing AC/DC at deliberate volume. I remember that my conduct had pushed him into a mild Louisish hostility, as I’d known it would. That was my fault and I admit it. Louis’ quiet, but apparent assumption that I should instantly answer his confession without difficulty had pissed me off, and I didn’t know how to respond except to piss him off in return. “Can’t we talk about this?” he’d said, in a voice colored by gentlemanly rage, and I had ignored him and started to sing along, “knocking me out with those American thighs.” He’d folded his arms. Good. In the back of my mind, his confession was percolating.

Maybe it wasn’t entirely my fault. You’ll notice that this is a consistency of his; to assume that because he’s been thinking about it, everybody else is on the same page when he finally speaks. And I couldn’t say “that was selfish of you,” which it was, and as I had done two weeks ago, because he should have known it by now, and if he didn’t there was no help for him. So I didn’t say anything. I just sang along with _Back in Black_ and ignored him. Now, in transcription, that reasoning is so stupid that I cringe from it, but I remember that it happened, and so here it is.

I remember what he was wearing too, those same slim fitting blue-jeans, and a black t-shirt and a cardigan that was much too big for him. His clothes seemed to sum him up in that moment – his hair unbrushed too, in a messy ponytail that had started to slip out. Such a lot of effort to look like he wasn’t making any. That seemed typical of him, and it irritated me almost as much as his speech, or lack of speech had done. Either way, we had arrived home – home! – and had entered the flat in silence, and had avoided each other for a couple of hours.

I think I went out, actually. No, I did, I definitely did. On my own, without even taking the dog, for a little walk and a little drink. I’d taken it at the All Night diner from the girl at the counter, leaning in to fix her hair as I’d wanted to fix Louis’, kissing her cheek and then taking something from her, just a little bit. As if in apology, I’d then bought a small package of cooked bacon and had over-tipped her for it (I’ll assume. I gave her considerably more money than it cost, anyway). I don’t know why I would have wanted to apologize for something so natural. I suppose because I didn’t want to cede the moral high-ground, even when nobody was watching. How typical of me! Oh, the things one notices about oneself when one is also the narrator.

Then I had come home and found Louis stretched out on the rug in front of the unlit fireplace, reading a magazine. The dog was next to him, curled against his body, and the magazine was open against the rug, so I couldn’t see the title. I expected Mojo to come to me when I entered, but while he looked up at me, he didn’t rise and he didn’t come over. Judas, I thought, fleetingly, before removing my leather gloves and laying them upon the sideboard.

“What are you reading?” I said, to Louis, because it was the only neutral thing I could think of to say. It seemed insincere to give a greeting. I removed the package of bacon from my jacket pocket and set it against the sideboard too. Nothing from the dog.

“ _Oil and Gas Journal_ ,” Louis said.

Oh, Louis. God. “That’s a thing?” I asked, in disbelief, unwinding my scarf. It was too hot for a scarf, but that hadn’t stopped me. 

“What I have noticed,” said Louis, closing the magazine. The dog stirred. _Now_ he stirred. “Is that the closer one gets to the Earth Sciences, the more forthright the titles of journals tend to be.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“For example,” he told me, “what do you think the most prominent scientific journal for the publication of new discoveries in geology is called?”

“I don’t know, _Boring Rocks in a Journal_?”

“Close enough. _Geology_. _Geology_ Magazine.” 

I laughed. He smiled. Alright.

“It’s nothing. It’s about the energy profile of Colombia, but…”

“Louis,” I said. “I didn’t know you were frustrated then.”

Louis was quiet for a little while. “That’s not entirely your fault,” he said, eventually.

“How wonderfully gracious of you to say so,” I said, slipping off my jacket and throwing it against the sofa.

“Couldn’t you hang that up?”

“It’s my fucking flat, Louis. And I’ve seen yours. Don’t bitch at me like you’re my wife. You’re not allowed to do that until you marry me.”

“You’re still talking about that?”

There was probably a dry comment to make in response to him, but I didn’t make it. “Fuck you,” I said. 

Louis had turned back to _Oil and Gas Journal_. Ignoring me, I thought, angrily, though as it turns out, I was wrong about it.

“Come over here,” he said. 

“Not if you’re going to be boring.”

“As you wish,” he said, though he didn’t look at me. I picked up the bacon and came over. I sat down next to the dog, and it worked. Mojo removed his body from Louis’ proximity, and shoved his snout into my lap, panting.

I wasn’t about to be totally won over. “Oh, you love me now,” I said, unwrapping the paper, feeding him a little piece. “When I’m right next to you, with a treat for you. Until then, you can’t even be bothered to cross a room for me.”

“He’s tired,” Louis said. “When you’re old, it’s easy to be tired, even in spite of temptation.”

“Nonsense. Mojo will be young forever.” 

“Lestat,” Louis said, and I looked at him sharply.

He was unfazed. “You’ve fed. I can smell it.”

“Yes. That’s new, isn’t it? That’s something new you can do?”

“I think so,” he said. “I could always smell you, but now I think I can smell changes in you.”

“Erotic,” I said. He snorted.

“Haven’t you?” I asked him. “Why don’t you go out now?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Aren’t you hungry? You haven’t had anything since last night.”

“No, thank you,” he said. “No, it’s not necessary just now. I’m quite well.” 

“Don’t you think, though…”

He cut me off. Calmly, but firmly. “I’m capable of feeding myself.”

“Alright!” I said, a little angrily. “I’m not trying to rob you of your independence. I just don’t want you to not do something for some nonsensical, Louisish reason. Can you blame me if I don’t always trust you?”

Louis paused. He seemed to be thinking. Then he said, “I wonder if that statement isn’t a little more profound that you know.”

“Fuck you,” I said. “The therapist’s job is the therapist’s, and not yours. Don’t analyze me like that, it’s just insulting.”

“Lestat,” he said. Just that, just my name. I looked away. He made me furious, speaking to me like that. So softly. As if he were unquestionably right. I hated him.

“I got something for the dog,” I said, while the dog was licking my fingers, and then the paper, in case there was anything left. There wasn’t, and I petted him in consolation, having forgiven him. Of course I’d forgiven him. He was innocent like a child, and Louis is so seductive. “Shouldn’t I get something for you too?”

“Lestat,” he said, again.

“A sickness,” I said. “The consumption.”

“Excuse me?”

I hadn’t entirely meant to say that. I wondered why I had. Oh, it was the right thing to say, close to the truth, or the thing that needed to be talked about. But I don’t know why I’d been honest with him when I could have been cruel.

“I’m a sickness, you said,” I told him. “A disease you can’t recover from.”

“Did I really say that?”

I didn’t answer.

Louis frowned. “Then it was said out of anger. I apologize.”

“It wasn’t only though. You also said it when… when I think you thought you were being romantic.”

“Ah.”

“It’s not as if…”

Louis’ silence probably wasn’t the challenge or prompt I thought it was, but suddenly I felt more stupid not speaking than I had about speaking.

“Sometimes you’re mean,” I said, not looking at him, deciding upon understatement. “How am I supposed to know when you mean things?”

“Am I?”

“Louis,” I said. “You once burned down a theatre. You once burned down _me_. Sometimes you’re mean.”

He appeared to have to think about this too. He sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said, but it had taken him long enough to say it that for a moment I didn’t understand what he meant.

“For what?” 

“For what I said about you.”

“Okay.”

“For the record, I’m also sorry for setting you on fire.” This was said lightly, but I knew it was very serious. Or at least that it should be very serious, and that if he meant it lightly, then he was far, far meaner than I had previously implied.

“You’ve already apologized for that,” I said, sharply.

“I felt it could bear a second apology.”

“Okay.”

“I’m not trying to start the argument again.”

“I said, okay.”

Louis had sat up, his legs curled against his body, his eyebrows knotted together in that familiar way. Guilty. Or troubled, or sad. I felt bad for him.

“I also love you,” I said.

Louis said, “thank you.”

“Nothing about that has changed.”

“I know.”

“Didn’t you think it would? Aren’t you ever worried that it will?”

“No,” he said. He didn’t add anything else to that. I felt myself beginning to simmer like a pan on an element. I wanted to tell him. You shouldn’t assume, Louis, I wanted to say. You shouldn’t ever assume that I’ll love you.

But he had changed the subject before I was able to speak to it. “I have read your books, you know.”

“Yeah, I know. And so what?”

“ _The Vampire Lestat,”_ he said, “I’ve read it. I’ve read it again, and I’ve tried to understand.”

“Yeah, and I said so what.”

He was quiet again. Thinking again. Or pausing for effect, I’d become unsure. He seemed to study my face, or to hold me still by seeming to. Irritating.

“What, Louis?”

“I just want you to know that I know,” he said. “Alright, Monsieur?”

“What do you know?”

“Let me put it for you this way,” he said. “Don’t you think, if there was something that inherently terrible about you, that I would have ceased to love you the way I do?”

“But there are terrible things.”

“Yes, there are.”

“But you still love me.”

“Yes,” he said. “Very, very much.”

“Why?”

“Many reasons.” He was still looking at me. “But we’ve had this conversation before. Why do you love me?”

“Who says I do?”

That hurt him. I saw it. Not, I suppose, because he could have possibly thought I meant it, given I’d only just told him that I did, but for some other reason I didn’t understand. He tried to cover it, but I saw it playing across his eyes, across his mouth. It felt good to wound him like that, it felt powerful. I wanted to deliver the killing blow.

Though it also felt terrible, and then I couldn’t make up my mind. I wished I’d never spoken.

“It was easier, wasn’t it?” I said.

“Pardon?”

“Forgiving me my instabilities when I was unable to underscore them in words.”

“I don’t…”

“Forget it.”

“But I…”

“You don’t have to worry, anyway. I’ve already told you I’m going crazy. If you’ll just wait long enough eventually you’ll get lucky and I’ll lose it for good and you’ll have exactly the partner you want; a silent one. Won’t you be vindicated then.”

“Lestat,” Louis said, a third time, but it wasn’t soft anymore. Rather, he sounded appalled by me. I knew should have hated him for that too, and some dim part of me did so. But mostly, I felt sympathy. I'd been trying to goad him, I really had, but had ended up telling the truth – that I was sorry for him, having to live with me. I was too tired for real cruelty, I supposed. The room seemed to distort a little, and I accepted this as inevitable. Perhaps he’d been right about the dog.

I closed my eyes. Opened them again. Strange how everything had begun to look two-dimensional.

“What the fuck do you want from me, Louis?” 

His shoulders came up when I said that, as if I’d offended him, as if he intended to get up and leave. But he didn’t. Instead, he leaned over, and put his arms about my waist. I was startled by it. I might have got up myself, but his scent, and his closeness made me respond against my will, and I enclosed him. The dog, offended by all of our movement, had got out from between us, and had moved to an unoccupied portion of the rug, had laid down again. I watched him for a moment, gathering my resources.

“ _Oil and Gas Journal_ ,” I said. Maybe it was the only thing I could remember.

“What?”

“This really matters to you, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, it does. But it doesn’t matter now.”

“Since when does it matter at all?” I asked, though I thought better of it as soon as it came out of my mouth.

Thankfully, probably, Louis declined to answer.

“I would like it if we could recycle,” he said, instead. 

I liked the sound of that assumed “we,” though I’d never have said so when I meant it. “Alright, mon cher,” I replied, “if that’s what you’d like, then we shall recycle.”

“I would like it,” he said. He paused. He looked troubled again. Another frown. “I don’t know if it does any good.”

I had to laugh at that, which seemed to offend him. “It’s not as funny as you think it is.”

“I know, chéri.”

“We, in particular, should think about it. It wants thought.”

“You want to think,” I corrected him. “You always want to think. You’re an intellect. Don’t you ever get bored of thinking?”

“No,” he said, and I recognized the tone.

“I’m not trying to make fun of you, Louis,” I said. “You’re just so much _you_ , don’t you see that? You’re always _you_. Thinking about things that really don’t concern you. It’s very endearing.”

“That statement, again, is layered, isn’t it? Where, precisely, _should_ I concern myself? Should I be concerned about you now, after all you’ve just said?”

“Louis,” I said, as tenderly as I could, but it didn’t help. He had pulled away from me a little, so I kissed his cheek, wrapping my arms around his waist now, attempting to pull him down onto the rug with me. He resisted, but it was a tokenistic resistance. He did it so that he could accede to it in the manner that he chose to. Really, he was far more cat-like than I ever am, easing his body against mine in utter, indifferent gracefulness. It felt good, even if some of it was complicated.

Because there are things I can’t control, I thought. Things I can’t stop. There’s symbolism that is, as it turns out, not actually symbolism at all, but rather things that are happening to me that I must then symbologize. I wanted to tell him this; that’s the story of my life, I think, that it’s difficult to make sense, and that that has a dual meaning, like most of the words that matter to us. I put my forehead to Louis’.

“That’s nice,” I told him, softly. “Perhaps it’s a waste of time, speaking.”

Louis sighed. I stroked his hair back, and was tempted to fondle him, but I knew it would go over poorly. He’d already shaken his hair out, back over his face.

“Are you frustrated now?” I teased.

“What is wrong with you?” he snapped. “Must you turn everything into a perverse battle of wills?”

Must _I_? I thought incredulously, but I didn’t say it.

“If we’re going to talk about that, then perhaps we should talk about how much of this arrangement is motivated by your sanity, or lack thereof,” he said. It was a low blow, and he knew it. I smelled him flushing before I saw it. But I didn’t say anything.

Louis shifted against me again, closer into the crook of my body. I wanted to tighten my arms, and I almost did, but some part of me resented that manipulation. He was showing me his throat, like an animal – see? See how weak I am? – instead of apologizing, and I knew the gesture too well to be fooled. But then his fingers brushed my arm, and they were so delicate, and he was such a beautiful creature and so close to me. I kissed his mouth, lightly. He didn’t respond. The flush had faded. His expression was strange.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was uncalled for.”

I couldn’t answer. Fine then, say it in words if you have to. It scarcely seemed necessary. 

“I shouldn’t speak of it lightly like that. I am sorry.”

I couldn’t answer, but I had to. The two dimensions had turned back into three, sort of, and that would have to do. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s funny, if you think about it, which you will. Don’t you think there’s a certain amount of very black humor in my being a vampire losing his sanity? It rather puts a pall over immortality, thinking that I might not even recognize it if it…”

“No,” he said. “It’s not remotely funny. Of course it isn’t.”

It’s not of course, I thought, but didn’t say. Nothing is of course. “I think it is. But then, I’m crazy.” 

Louis opened his mouth to speak, then seemed to think better of it. He bit his lip. Then, “look, won’t you just…”

“Won’t you just let it go? Don’t apologize, then I’ll have to.”

“And perhaps you should. What is it about apology to which you are so resistant?”

“At least I’m consistent,” I said. “It’s not only giving apologies that I don’t like.”

Louis said nothing. He’d begun to look genuinely frustrated now, and I desperately wanted to say so. The joke seemed too perfect, perfect enough that it might come out of my mouth of its own will. But I didn’t make it. My instincts protected me somehow, and I didn’t. Instead, I asked him about Colombia. I asked, as I always ask when I ask about his fancies, to get what I want, and to get out of trouble so I can get it.

“Why don’t you tell me about what you’re reading?” I said, kissing him again. “Tell me about that. Maybe I should know about it. Maybe it will make me cultured and serious like you are, and people will think I’m an intellectual.”

Louis was unimpressed. “People already think that about you, as I’m sure you know. At least, I do, and I have said so.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m perfectly intelligent, I’m only lazy.”

“It’s a little unfair to bring up comments I’ve made in the heat of the moment, while we are fighting, don’t you think?”

I looked at him. “Darling,” I said. “I’m here. I’m listening to you. Don’t look a gift audience in the mouth.”

“The conversation we are having is unresolved.”

“So what if it is? I don’t care anymore, and neither should you. Let it go. Why don’t you tell me why we’re going to recycle?”

“It’s not as straightforward as that.”

“Surely it is.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Lestat,” he said firmly, in the manner of a parent disciplining a child. How well I remembered that tone of voice from him.

“Louis,” I said, raising my eyebrows, grinning a little. “Tell me about Colombia.”

“No,” he said. I waited.

It worked. Louis took a breath. “I’m basing this on limited knowledge, you’ll understand. But, do you know the phrase Banana Republic?”

“Yes, of course.”

“It arose to describe countries where a corrupt government organizes around a single resource, and controls it. When people use the term in reference to Central America…”

“I said, yes.”

“…It’s usually employed to describe nations where those governments had been hastily installed by the United States to protect corporate interests, and capitalism in general, during the Cold War. After United Fruit, in Colombia, in Honduras. The term was coined by O.Henry, actually, and…”

“After what?”

“United Fruit.”

“No, the… the war. You mean Vietnam.”

“Vietnam was… alright, yes, if you like. That’s the right time period, yes. That’s one conflict during the period, yes, but the Cold War refers to a number of conflicts and policies during that period, and Vietnam...”

“Okay, Louis.”

“I’m sorry, but do you want to know about this, or don’t you? There’s a good deal to understand about American foreign policy in this context, and it is all important.”

“I don’t need to know about that. Just tell me about Colombia.”

He smiled, almost. Seemingly against his will, because it was gone quickly. But I knew why. I was playing to it. Deliberately. Adjusting my body and my face to reflect the kind of person I knew he found irresistible. Innocent of world affairs, ignorant and needing to be educated by him. Shifting my hips against him, I grinned at him again and I thought I saw him begin to blush.

“Well… BP was responsible for the construction of a pipeline there. It was poorly maintained, and it devastated the arable land in 192 villages.” It made him sad, or at least it made the flush fade. “They wouldn’t pay damages,” he continued. “The workers – Colombian workers, the gas Union - occupied the plant. And then, the National Army was sent in to quell them.”

“And then what happened?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “ _Oil and Gas Journal_ is an industry journal, it’s really only concerned with the share prices, and most of the story isn’t here. All of that is about is the energy profile of the nation, following these events. From my reading elsewhere, I understand that some people were killed, and the rest were simply intimidated, but…”

“Oh, but that doesn’t…”

“It’s complicated. Still, paramilitary groups have been employed to keep oil workers in line for as long as BP has operated in Colombia. It isn’t really news.”

“Oh, but that’s awful.”

His expression, behind his hair, was flat. I suspected him of being somewhat incredulous, but he was also clearly trying very hard to avoid showing it. “Do you think so? I didn’t think you’d care much; it’s just politics in some other place.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Workers revolutions.”

“Oh, you approve?”

“Perhaps I’m a communist.”

Louis’ mouth twitched. “Do you know what a communist is, Monsieur?”

I didn’t answer, trusting my expression to do that work for me. A beat of silence. Another beat. Then, “of course you do,” he said. “I apologize.” 

I laughed. “You’re right, though. It wouldn’t suit me. I don’t want to share my toys.”

“There’s more to it than that.”

“Not really, though, is there? Communism, you know, it’s a nice idea, I understand that, but it’s not so nice as the pursuit of enlightenment.”

“Excuse me?”

“Capitalism!” I said. “Capitalism! Is there any better expression of people? It’s the purity of the savage garden, the vibrancy of what it truly means to kill or be killed, the inventiveness of pure necessity, distilled into economic relations, molded into the fabric of this world. Without it, we’d have nothing. There wouldn’t be a democracy. There wouldn’t be innovation. There wouldn’t be an America.”

“I thought you were indifferent to America,” he said.

“I’ve come round.”

“There wouldn’t be a Deepwater Horizon either,” he said. “Or a bad pipeline in Colombia.”

“You can’t blame capitalism for that,” I said. “Not any more than you can blame a tiger for eating people. So it drinks a little blood. Of course it does. It’s a tiger.”

Louis thinned his lips. I couldn’t tell whether he disagreed with me, or simply found the analogy distasteful.

“I thought you said it was awful.”

“You’re not a communist either,” I told him. “If you were, you’d sell your stocks and your properties and pay the money to taxes. I bet you don’t even pay taxes. I bet you’ve accountanted yourself out of it.”

“I pay some tax,” Louis said. “The capital gains…”

“You know you don’t have to pay capital gains if you’re smart about where you officially trade. It’s called a tax shelter. You need something in Liechtenstein, or in the Caymans.”

“Is that something your business manager told you?” he said, but he was smiling again now, I thought, or about to.

“Yes,” I said. “I know some things. I know, for example, that you tell me I’m worse than you are, but that that is only superficially true, and that the proof of this is that there is a lot of bullshit in your car.”

He didn’t answer that. What he said instead was, “why are you talking about communism?”

“I don’t fucking know,” I said. And it was sort of a lie, you know that, and so did he, I think. But it wasn't entirely a lie, and he should have known that too. So I was trying to get what I wanted, so what? Why did I want that? That's the better question, and in that moment it seemed the better question to me too. I felt I shouldn't have had to answer it. Read my subtext! I wanted to say. His expression, however, insisted I make it text.  
  
“I’m just trying to talk to you," I told him. "I’m trying to talk about something I think you’ll like talking about, because I like you, because I love you, and I want to talk to you amicably. I want to be friends with you because we live in the same house and we’re trying to be adults, so we’ll talk about adult things, like taxes and political systems.”

“But communism.”

“Shut up, Louis,” I snapped. “I’m warning you, I swear. Shut the fuck up and appreciate that I’m trying to be good to you.” 

“Of course I appreciate that.”

“Appreciate it more.”

“Lestat,” he said, “I appreciate it.”

“Well, what, then?”

“I worry,” he said. “I just worry.”

I felt a stab of something I couldn’t untangle. His expression was so complicated, even if it was the same, simple face that I recognized. The furrowed brow, the lips.

“Not about me.”

“Sometimes.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“Shouldn’t somebody?”

“My mother can do it when she comes.”

“Lestat,” Louis said, “that’s not really Gabrielle’s modus operandi, is it?”

I said nothing. His voice had been flat, even vaguely tender and certainly not barbed at all. But it had made my eyes prick and my tongue still. He must have noticed, because he said, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I snapped. “You’re right. It was a stupid thing to say. Nobody cares what the hell I do.”

“I do.”

“When it irritates you.”

Louis sighed. Deeply, and wearily. It was like a match to petrol. I barely managed not to smack him.

“Fuck you, you insufferable cunt. You’re just as horrible as I am.”

Louis looked shocked. Then he looked offended. And then, wonder of wonders, he began to laugh. It was low, and sweet, and gentlemanly, and it was the last thing I had expected and I was utterly stunned for the second time in one evening.

“What are you laughing at?” I demanded. “What is so fucking funny about this mess?”

He didn’t answer, so I pulled his hair away from his face again and held it there. Sharply. I couldn’t tell if I meant to do him damage. “You’re a hypocrite,” I said. “You should apologize for that, if you’re going to apologize for anything.” 

“Yes,” Louis said. “Yes, I…” He seemed as if he were trying to stop laughing, but couldn’t. I felt some sympathy toward that condition, though at the same time it felt utterly unforgiveable. I jerked the hand holding his hair, and “I love you,” I said, though I have no idea why, when what I really meant was “I hate you.” It wasn’t said in a favorable tone either.

And he didn’t say anything in response to it. He’d put his hand over his mouth and was still laughing. I was tempted to do something that would really hurt him. Sorely tempted. But I didn’t. Somehow I didn’t. “I like your laugh,” I said, in the same tone. “I like the way you look when you laugh. I like the way you sound.”

He looked up at me. And then he smiled.

I don’t know how describe that, really. It’s not in my vocabulary for Louis, that smile. It was tender and quiet and easy to understand. His laughter was subsiding, and my hand had stilled of its own accord. That frightened me, stupidly, and for no reason at all.

“I do love you,” I said. “I mean it.”

“I know you mean it.”

“Why don’t you say it back?”

“I don’t know. Why didn’t you say it before?”

“Touché,” I said. “Cunt.”

By now, his laughter was little more than an echo. He didn’t seem upset by my words, though he was silent except for that. And it was for too long, for long enough that it became frightening again, in that same stupid way. I grabbed him and I kissed him. It was rough enough to make him struggle away from it. I think my body hadn’t caught up with my thoughts, and when I realized that I wanted to cry. “Sorry,” I heard myself say. “Shit. Shit, I’m sorry.”

Louis frowned. But at the same time his hand moved against my back as if he meant to reassure me. I wanted to protest that, though I also didn’t. It seemed impossible. All of it seemed impossible.

“I know,” he said, which made everything even more impossible in a veritable instant. “What a complicated person you are.”

That seemed the understatement of the century. I laid my face against his, closing my eyes to avoid looking at him. Cold. I wanted to give him some of my warmth.

“You’re the one reading about human industry.”

“And you’re the one playing in an eighties cover band.”

“Louis,” I said, “I don’t know why we can’t figure this out.”

“Don’t you think that we are?” he said. “That was, and it seems an oxymoronic statement, I certainly admit that, but that was a ‘good fight,’ comparatively. I think that’s how people come to terms with these things.”

“There’s no such thing as a good fight.”

“We both got angry,” he said, “but nothing was broken. Nothing was said that can’t be taken back, or forgotten. I suspect it’s unrealistic to hope for some kind of Elysium, don’t you?”

Touché, again. “Did you really get angry?”

“You couldn’t tell?”

“Of course I could tell, I just… you just won’t usually admit it.”

“Look,” he said. “You’re right. It’s not only you that is complicated.”

“I know. I know that.”

He sighed, but it was a sigh I forgave him for. Our bodies were twinned together in a harmony that had taken us centuries to perfect, even if our words lay at an awkward angle.

“Colombia,” I said. “British Petroleum. It’s like metaphor.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. For responsibility. As if we can’t just follow our desires, because they’re at someone else’s expense. That seems poignant for vampires, don’t you think? Or for relationships.”

“It’s not metaphor,” he told me. “We are responsible for that. Literally.”

“I’m not going to stop driving.”

“I know you’re not.”

“Or sex,” I said. “It’s definitely a metaphor for sex. We’re drinking the blood out of the Earth, and we’re fucking it.”

Louis’ mouth twitched again. “Perhaps it’s better left without a metaphor.”

“How do you feel about sex, then?”

“That’s complicated too, obviously. I understand the temptation to grand narrative, I don’t judge you for that, but the truth of the situation is that events happen by action, and through the decisions we make. It’s tempting to use passion as an excuse for unconsciousness but I…”

I was my turn to laugh now. “No, darling. I mean… you know, now.”

“Um,” Louis said. I think I’d taken him by surprise. It made me grin.

“I’m tired of talking. Why don’t you let me do something I’m good at?”

He bit his lip. “Aren’t we still talking?”

“We can talk in bed, if we have to, though I hope we won’t. Genuinely. How would you feel about it?”

Louis blinked his eyes. His expression was unreadable, but not unpleasant. He said nothing, for a long time. Until, eventually, he said, “cautiously amenable.”

I laughed. Adorable. “Really?”

“Shouldn’t I? How do you feel about it?”

“I don’t know, Captain Planet. Do you think we can just ‘have sex’ like two regular people without any grand excuse for it? As an experiment, it’s unquestionably interesting.”

Another flush. “Not if you keep talking about it.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I shouldn’t speak. I’ll break the spell. Do you want to talk about Colombia again? Maybe we should spoil things now and save the disappointment.”

“Speak if you’d like. I didn’t mean to say that you shouldn’t speak.”

Instead I kissed him. On the mouth. I did it almost without thinking, and once I realized I was doing it, my heart beat fast enough that I thought I might choke. I wanted to pull away. I might even have blushed, had I been the sort of person who did that. But I worried only long enough to collect myself, then I kissed him again. Louis’ mouth parted for me, and that was delicious.

"There," I said. "A decision. Just as you like."  
"Decisions, unfortunately, do actually require that we consider our actions."

“Fuck you,” I said, and at that, he smiled in a way that was slightly more familiar to me. Faint malice, intellectual amusement.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s the matter under discussion.”

“Fuck you,” I repeated. I’d started to laugh, but I kissed him again anyway. I tasted his tongue, and his hands tightened at the small of my back. The pounding in my chest had begun to subside, replaced by a steady rhythm.

“Yes,” Louis said. “You may.”

“Fuck you, you cunt. I love you.”

His smile had become indulgent. I felt a stab of fury at it, in tandem with a stab of something much sweeter. I thrust my hand down the back of his pants and heard him inhale. I took that as my cue to caress him there.

“I love you,” I said, again. I’m sure it had begun to sound menacing. His hips moved against me in a way that made me want to be menacing.

“I love you too,” he said, finally. “Please don’t call me a cunt.”

“Stop being one, then.”

He raised an eyebrow, though it was obvious that the composure it took was effort. “Are you trying to talk yourself out of the situation?” he asked me. “You should know that you are close to doing so. My consent is conditional upon your treatment of me, as you should reasonably expect.”

“Fuck you. You’re in my power now, and you know it. Stop being a princess.”

“Stop being a brat.”

“Stop wearing clothes,” I said, moving quickly, tugging his cardigan away from his shoulders, and his shirt away from his body. He protested, but not really, trying to roll on top of me in mock offense. It didn’t help him. I pinned him and stripped his chest bare in record time. It was glorious. So it drinks a little blood, I thought. It’s a tiger.

“Mojo,” Louis breathed. 

“What?”

“The dog is watching us,” he said. “Shouldn’t we go to bed?”

I had to laugh. Sometimes you do. And then.

And then we’re back at this question, this lie I told you, or this sort of lie, that I began with here tonight, because you want to know if we fucked and I don’t know what to tell you. So abrupt. I’m sorry. But I remember it, and so here it is. But there's a reason. But I'm too tired to go on, and the sun is coming soon, and his book is looking at me, untorn, and full of accusations. But I don't like giving apologies and I'm sorry I did so. But. Shall I describe what we did there, alone in bed with only the two of us? His face, and my memory of it, and no other concern but that? No more world, no more oil spill. I’d like to tell you – you know how I like to tell you everything. But it’s complicated.

  
It’s like this: all of the violence, all of the horror, all that that I can tell you about simply, or sort of simply, in that at least I can say “this action,” or “those words,” and “this symbolism,” even if I can’t say why, really why, a person might choose to do those things. But with this I can’t. Yes, we kissed each other as we got in together. Yes, we touched each other, and we made small wounds in each other’s bodies. But I’m not sure it came to anything more than that. Perhaps it remained unculminated. Because it didn’t matter. Because the intimacy is the part that matters, the confidential disclosure between friends, and that perhaps, sometimes, confidential is what it should be.

  
It makes sense, though, doesn’t it, don’t you think? That it doesn’t matter, really, what kind of fucking it was, because one man’s fucking is another man’s foreplay, and because “faith,” as Melville says, “like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.” Fucking is fucking, even when it isn't. And a book is a book, no matter what it cost you. 

I know that now, truly. I promise. So haven’t I won? Haven't I caught it by letting it slip away? A tiger, or a white whale, It’s almost too cruel to harpoon it, when in its sleep it isn’t a monster at all, just a complicated creature that doesn’t know anything. 


	2. Somebody down there likes me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I want to preface this chapter with the same notes I did the last chapter. This is less explicit, perhaps, but we're dealing with the same material. Messy consent, discussion of messy consent, and horrible power games, and general descriptions of horrible emotional states particularly trauma responses and a lot of stuff about Oedipal vampire sex. Just so you know.

 Somebody down there likes me.

 

In my old age, I think I've noticed something about television. I've watched television since I’ve been able to, of course - and that is an of course, even if I won’t let you give anything else that suffix. Take this as a rare exception: vampires always love television. _Always_. Of course we do. 

 

I mean, really think about it, won’t you? What other window would we have on that strange, daylit world you inhabit? How else could we see how you do things when you’ve got to move around in the sunlight we can’t (or prefer not to)? What other hook could I have to the passage of time as actually meaning something, or to learning your strange customs and fashions, all the better to mimic them, my dear? It’s a marvelous invention, and by the time I woke up, it was already in color so I didn’t even have to bother with black and white.

 

And you should see the television I have now! Plasma screen, immense, and with all of the accoutrements it needs to function (at last count, this includes tivo, satellite dish, apple tv, xbox, surround sound and a USB port, because if you are going to watch television, my love, you may as well watch all of the television available). It is a monument to the glory of several things; invention, plasticity (again), the market-place of ideas – and what’s more, a market-place that does delivery! It is not only a window on the world, it is a cornerstone talisman of its anarchic innovation. Of course I love it. It was practically invented to my philosophic design.   

 

And I have appreciated it especially, lately. When not recording or working on this fucking thing, my current inability to do anything besides lie on my sofa with my hands between my knees while watching it would have revealed television’s profundity to me had I not known it already.  It’s not only an intellectual tool, you know. It’s also for a kind of reassuring company, and the content of television programs will helpfully tell you this if you’re unlucky enough not to know. You’re never alone with TV! Once switched on, it will provide you with companionable voices, and voices which will not tell you to do anything evil. Unless ordering useless products from telephone ordering companies is evil, I suppose. But ranked in a list of my sins, even a list of my sins in the service of consumerism, I think this is a horror whose nature is comparatively minor.

 

But anyway, in the last month I have noticed this about television: do you know situation comedies? This is where the characters begin and end in the same situation each week, and there’s always something (this is another rare example of the accurate use of “of course”), some moral misunderstanding that they will have to resolve over the length of the episode. It’s funny the way they do it, and there are jokes - they’re always funny or at least ostensibly so (situation _comedies_ , dearest, not situation tragedies). But I assume you know what they are, and my description is merely a courtesy. That isn’t what I want to tell you about them. What I want you to notice is this: in situation comedies, there is always a scene in which the family will eat together.

 

I always love it. _Always_. It doesn’t matter if it is _Roseanne_ or _That 70’s Show_ or _Home Improvement_ or _Everybody Loves Raymond_ or my personal favorite, _The Adams Family_ (I make an exception regarding black and white for this one. For obvious reasons, but also, honestly, it is much better than anyone gives it credit for), or anything else that I’ve watched in my long, long life of television connoisseurship, and I have watched a _lot_ of television, as I’m sure I’ve just got through telling you. They all have this scene. Always.  
  
  
You’ve noticed by now, I’m sure, that even though I won’t let you say forever, that I won’t let anyone say of course, here, I will. Because it _is_ forever. And it _is_ of course. Situation comedy, as it happens, can comfort you when nothing and nobody else can. They are, or present, a pattern, a consistency, in a life that has so few others. Admittedly, this is not the most exciting part of television. We’re talking about an invention that beams all of the information from all of the world into one source, one box in your sitting room, and there is nothing like it on Earth, and I’m telling you about situation comedies. I know. I admit it’s banal. I’m human enough to know that, especially when compared to MTV and foreign wars and the way they look now, and the Tupac Hologram and all else besides. But shouldn’t such consistency impress us? The world is so unstable, but always this form, always this scene. Take a lesson in this, my lamb. Sometimes the very boring is also the very profound.

 

Don’t you think so? Isn’t it miraculous that it’s always there? Even when you might not expect it – _Friends_ , for example, isn’t about families in the same way that _Full House_ or _The Cosby Show_ are, but the characters will sit at Monica’s table, or at that café that they all like and where the waiter has a crush on Rachel and Joey worked and Phoebe plays sometimes. In _Seinfeld_ , they eat at that same diner in every episode. _The Office_ has its breakroom and _Parks and Recreation_ its J. J.'s, and I think this is the same thing. For a situation comedy, you’ve got to have the characters eating together. This is how you can tell that they are segmented in their togetherness, that they are a family. They break bread, they sup wine, they tolerate each other. This moment is a communion. This moment reveals to you that the hate that moves the plot along, the frustrations of life and the jokes that they make about each other are not really as cruel as they sounded. This is the moment that allows that the situation be reset, as if a record has finished and the needle is automatically taking itself home.

 

It takes being unfamiliar with it, perhaps, to notice it, to notice how sincere this continuity is, how meaningful. How much it says about humanity even if it’s not actually applicable to real-life humans - not the way it’s depicted, anyway. I certainly don’t remember any real family table in my own mortal life, for example, and my family was about as routine as anyone’s (to a point. At least, they were as routine as any other penniless nobleman’s, surely. Surely I invented much of its tragic romance?) When I was young I’d eat standing up, or going out, or in my room and only sometimes at the table if I couldn’t possibly avoid it, but that wasn’t the same thing at all. Nobody likes getting belted about the face for some unanticipated slight, even if I was used to it. Even if, if I’m frank with you dearest, I did sometimes do things to anticipate it.

 

So it isn’t real, that scene, and I know that. In real life, family has no sense of resetting, only a sense of grinding eternity. But if I was wrong about that particular eternity, since in the context of my life, my human family table was fleeting, then so what? I’m right about the generality, and besides, you don’t have all the information. I’m not telling you what it was, I’m only telling you how it felt to me. How it feels to me. Every time. Even though I don’t eat (not the way you do, anyway) and I don’t eat breakfast especially (it’s often breakfast), and so this sitcom profundity does not make an obvious analogy for anything I have to tell you about Louis. And yet.

 

Yes, hello. We’re still talking about Louis. Did you think I’d forgotten? Oh, the rich, bloody irony in that assumption. We’re still talking about him. Probably forever, and that you may consider another “of course” (that’s two tonight. Aren’t you lucky). Take a third, even: I think of him whenever I see this, and that’s never made any sense to me until now. Louis and I didn’t have a breakfast table. Obviously. And I had so far assumed that nothing either of us had done together could be remotely approximated with this poor, yet perfectly human, representation of comfort. And yet. And yet the table’s not actually the thing I’m talking about, is it? You knew that, didn’t you? Didn’t you know that? That it wasn’t the table, it isn’t the table, and it isn’t the eating? I think you knew. Of course, it’s something else entirely. Something I want to tell you about. And I will tell you. All in good time.

 

Oh, I know. You’re confused. Well, welcome to the club, darling. It isn’t as exclusive as Louis’ club with the therapist, but the Club of Confused Creatures has a distinguished membership. And I am in it, which surely must make it the best club anyone has ever joined. And imagine how I must feel, noticing this! Such banal mundanity, and taking such comfort in it! It was never my style. Not for us a breakfast table in an innocuous suburban house, nor even a diner to call our own. We are loners, iconoclasts, too cool for comfort, happy only in the solitary freedom of a wild night, whether out on the streets or lying prone in fake glasses in our well-appointed flats in Gulf Coast towns, not going out, not finishing our novels, and watching sitcoms. Imagine!

 

Okay, admittedly, for a time I frequented both the Waffle House and the Starbucks and wrote in them, but that isn’t the same thing. I did it alone, or to attend the kind of meeting with a person that is done only once (with my publisher, for example, whom I assured that something was coming. Then there was a small accident, but you don’t want to know about that now). And that’s exactly the wrong way to do it. The point is that you aren’t alone, and you’re not with strangers. It should be a ritual of togetherness, of forgetting, in which everything is made even and acceptable before it passes into the ether and returns again in its same original place. And I don’t do that. I’ve never done that. Even when I did do it, I didn’t know how it was done. The closest I ever came was the flat at the Rue Royale, and look what happened there. That should prove something to you. It hurts me to remember – physically, I mean, it actually makes my head hurt with the strain of it, and I’ll have to talk about it later in the chapter, because it’s essential to the fucking story, apparently, but not now. God. Not now. Just take my word for it.

 

So, no family tables. And in fact no real family at all. Well, some family, because my mother is present in this chapter, even if she is only present through absence. But mostly, everything is routine. This chapter is about routine, I want to tell you. It’s routine, and it’s about them. Genuinely. I don’t even mean _routine_ , that constant, constant, nauseatingly constant inertia and its collapse (of course) that you are so used to by now (my heart bleeds for you, darling. Imagine, living with this for the length of a _whole book_!) I mean _a routine_ , in the sense that for a little while, while we were lovers, Louis and I did the same thing every night for several months, or variations on it. I’m going to tell you about it. Would you like it if I did? I thought so. You’re predictable in that way. Like a sitcom. Yes. You see what I did there.

 

So, hello again. Hello, those of you who aren’t bored with me, who still love me, who still – let us be honest with each other at least – who still are waiting to find out what happened between Louis and I in Mobile. Je suis content que tu sois de retour! I promise. You’re welcome, welcome to all of this if you’re ready to take it. You may take, if you want to, the sight of typed words on my laptop computer, through the frame of my false glasses, the comfort of order, my wife, please! I will share it with you, because I am a novelist, a damned fucking novelist, who writes fucking novels, novels! Fuck! and who shouldn’t have bothered with anything else, and I’m so grateful that you are here.

 

I mean it. I know you’re about to make insinuations about my desire to play to an audience, you think I’m flattering you, or that I’m being sarcastic, or making some other performance. But that’s not what I mean, and I wish you’d listen to me. Do you remember when I used to write novels in weeks? I would just sit down at some desk, and I’d fire up WordStar (remember WordStar? Remember DOS?) and I would tell the whole story from start to finish. I’d break for sleep, sometimes, but only that, and only if I had to, because after the first novel I didn’t have to at all. If I had to use telepathy, I’d use it, whatever it took to tell the whole story. If I had to feed, I largely wouldn’t. Occasionally someone would wander in and talk to me and I’d have to talk back to them (to Louis, during _Body Thief_ and everybody – _everybody_ \- else, during _Queen of the Damned_ ). I tried to minimize those interruptions, but they always happened, and I always hated them. But this is different. I don’t have to write if you’re talking to me. And I’m grateful. That’s unusual. It’s unusual. Isn’t it?

 

I mean, back then, even interruptions wouldn’t really halt me. Every other minute, I’d just write. I’d write and I’d write everything. I’d write from when I began writing, until the work was done. I knew how to work in those days! I remember too that it would be violent, that funneling self-collapse, that total loss of my real intentions, that folding and tumbling and burning of my body as it was consumed by the text. When people came in I’d have to blink to clear my eyes, and I’d wish they were gone, and then the work would crest and peak out and leave me alone with myself, and I’d be nothing but a charred husk wrapped up in raw skin. My hands, I remember. The first thing I’d see, always, was my hands. On the keyboard, they’d become mundane again and I’d know it was finished. White at first and then tanned, but always banal. Oh, the profundity!

 

It hurt, novel writing. It always hurt. I never meant to do it, but I didn’t have to _do_ anything, except write, and no matter how much it burned, it was easy. It was purposeful, and important, even if it was horrifying, just like it was when the Devil claimed me. In the old days, my novels would happen like falling, really, honestly, not even meaning to equivocate, they would remind me of falling from the roof in Paris, when Armand pushed me off it. I’d suddenly hit the ground, and the novel would push its way through me, shattering every one of my bones in its passage, rupturing my organs, and there was no way to stop it happening. Back then, the novel would write itself in my own blood. There was a regularity to that. It was the exact opposite of routine, and because of that, it was a kind of comfort. The kind of comfort I expect to want. Meaning. Hell isn’t purgatory, after all. And I know what Hell is. I’ve been there. I know what it is. I also know what it is not.

 

What it is not is working on this fucking, fucking novel, here. I am doing it, Goddamn it, I am doing it, because if I don’t the emails will keep piling up, and the therapist will keep ringing, and they will keep assuming things about me, because this isn't a sitcom, it is the real world, and so they don’t know already. I must reset the record myself, as I’ve always done. I must do it, because there is nobody to do it for me. Even if this is not like anything before, even if it is not like falling, even this is like the years it took for my bones to heal afterwards. Pain every day. A dull, exhausting ache that gets no better, that has no peak, no approach and no fall.  Both hurt, but only one of them is this fucking tedious. If it burns, it’s a slow burning. It’s a burn of a kind where I’m already ashes. And that, my dear, is the difference between Hell and purgatory.

 

Oh, mon Dieu, but that is dramatic of me, even I must admit that here. Do I intend to make myself seem kinder, more vulnerable, more fundamentally decent in writing a confession like this for you? Yes, my confession is written from a place of utter, utter malaise, which of course makes my tragedies more fatalistic, and my sins less evident; my failures more telling of circumstance than they are revealing of character (that was always how it worked when Louis did it, anyway). But in reality, of course – you remember reality, don't you? You must tell me what it’s like there – I know I am none of these things, and that I deserve everything that’s happened to me, but this isn’t reality, darling, this is fiction. And in this fiction, you’ll feel sorry for me, won’t you? For I have no breakfast table, and nothing of its symbolic family togetherness, and I haven’t been out there lately, and I have nothing to do about it but watch sitcoms.

 

Only you won’t. You don’t care about me that way, and I’m not so stupid I don’t know that. You, like all others, love me for what I can show you. So let us get on with that. Perhaps it will please you to return to Fucking Mobile and Fucking Eternity and Fucking Louis and Gulfport. Something a little more in line with your usual understanding of me, perhaps. Would you like that? If I were dashing and arrogant and all of those things I’m so good at? There’s a fight in this chapter (or some fights; it’s your prerogative whether you choose to read them as separate instances or merely as points on our continuum of extended, antagonistic foreplay, because there’s fucking in this chapter also, but also because I can’t hold your hand every second). Does it please you? Are you happy? Good. Fine. You deserve to be, you’re here for such a short time, and I only hate you a little, chéri, don’t let it bring you down.

 

I don’t really hate you either. I’m sorry I said that, I shouldn’t have. I just hate _this_. Or I did hate it. I’m too tired even for that tonight. My hatred has worn flat, washed away by on a sea of tivo’d sitcoms and the blood of visiting hipsters (or _a_ hipster, no matter what he’d prefer to be called. Let’s not discuss that tonight, however. I should have killed him by now and I haven’t but JUST LET’S DON’T, alright? I’ll tell you later, if its important). I want you to be happy. Happy like I was, for a little while. Because of my substitute family. Because of my routine. Because of the period during which, over a few months in a Gulf Coast Alabama town, during which Louis and I lived briefly as an “of course,” and the same thing always happened. And there we are. Then, as now. A tedium, an inertia, a purgatory. Where I’m stupidly, stupidly, stupidly letting a sitcom make me happy. Just like you are. Well. Let me tell you.     

 

It went like this: every evening, because I woke earlier than he did, I’d hop up and let the dog out, and then I would let him in again, and feed him and dress quickly while he ate. This wouldn’t be my outfit for the whole evening, just my outfit for Mojo’s walk, which was why I was able to be quick about it (I’d wear a baseball shit, a scarf – the informality of the outfit was part of its charm), and then Mojo and I would step out and pick up a _Times-Picayune_. Then we’d go back, and back to bed, both of us, and fondle Louis into consciousness. We’d kiss (Louis and I), and sometimes it would go further than that and sometimes it wouldn’t. I would make the dog get off the bed if that happened. I’ve no desire to scar him for life by making him watch his parents go at it - I watch enough situation comedy to know that doing that to a vulnerable member of the family is something destined to become the subject of an entire episode.

 

But either way, Louis would read the _Press-Register_ (delivered) and thank me for the _Times-Picayune_ (which I could have had delivered, but which, for the reasons I have explained, I did not) and read that, while I played with my laptop computer – facebook and email and twitter and _Pitchfork_ and _Hipster Runoff_ and Perez Hilton and _Vice_ Magazine, but nothing of consequence – before typing the previous night’s notebook into a document. I wore my glasses to do this too, because of the image it gave, because I liked wearing glasses and a baseball shirt and usually no jeans by now in bed. Because it felt properly literary, even if there was nobody to see me do it, ostensibly making notes for my album as if it were some kind of genuine art. Often I’d take a photograph of myself with the computer. I don’t know why I did that. I turned the sound off, so Louis couldn’t hear me, but it makes a flash, and he’d sometimes comment when he saw it. Laugh a little, ask me if that were a genuine art project too. I bore this all with a charming good humor I doubt I could approximate now. I tried to take photographs of him too, but he moved quickly and I'd only ever get his paper or his book or the covers. I still have those photographs, even if like everything about him in this age they’re digital, fleeting.

 

And during all of this, we’d talk intermittently. About banal things. Novels we were reading, or whatever he was reading for review, or the book he was reading to me in the mornings before sleep (he was doing this then, every morning, like clockwork. It should tell you something that he did that, though I can’t be bothered to explain it to you. Either you understand it or you don’t, I don’t care). I knew I could count upon Louis to say something anxious about the Gulf, or the damages suit, or Iraq, or Afghanistan or eventually Syria so that I could make fun of him. This was routine too. I’m sure he did it on purpose. He would become briefly heated and imply that I was an intellectual peasant and then I’d forgive him and it would resolve because I’d goaded him into talking. What went on in the world? I would ask him, specifically to listen to his voice as he told me. Was it really different to how it used to be, or did he think it was the same? What did he think of Obama as president? (once, to get a rise out of him, I asked him how he thought about it as a former slave-owner, to which he curtly replied, “his father is Kenyan. As in, from Kenya. Directly from Kenya,” and nothing further). I know it doesn’t sound loving, needling him about the irrelevant things he was so insistent on caring about, but I really tried at that, I think. For a short time, I tried to listen to him. Or to pretend I was listening anyway. Sometimes we had arguments, but not usually. They didn’t matter anyway. They were never very serious.

 

That’s a lie. They were often serious, either for him or for I, and I shouldn’t deny that. I meant what I said to him, and what I confessed to you, that I wasn’t held together entirely, and there were echoes of that in my speech and in my thoughts, and they wouldn’t fade even when I thought they had. I ought not to romanticize that away entirely. It will help me here if I don’t, I know the rules. Even if I won’t take the calls, I’ve assimilated that routine too. Be honest, Lestat. I’m supposed to be honest. And we did fight, and it did matter.

 

But it was different! It was! Because Louis read to me, and that was something special, and I knew that (oh well, I suppose I’ve explained it after all. Lucky you). 5:30 (or whenever) would come, he'd open the book, and a peace would happen, and some little devil would tell me to destroy it. And then he would shift just so, and his voice would be just right, and perfectly quiet in exactly the right way for me to be quiet too. I let him calm me. How did that happen? How? It seems unusual, out of character for myself to describe this contentedness, and I suspect I am lying to you, even as I have no intent at all to lie, even as I try to be honest. We fought. I was working, I had projects just as I always do; I was angry and biting and full of malice just as I always am. But it was different! He slept in the same clothes every time, his black cotton t-shirt and his little black boxer briefs, and sometimes I’d make fun of how easily the briefs could be confused with hotpants, but even that never ended in the rain of fire it could have. I can’t tell you why it didn’t. I can’t tell you because I don’t know. I wish I did. Don’t you think I’d do something about it if I knew how it had happened? I don’t.

 

I don’t even know if it had happened in him, or in me. At some point after all of this, we would get up. At first he didn’t like me to hunt with him, which made things difficult at first because planning an evening had to include a point at which he could slip away from me, and I’d be jealous. Later in the piece, it happened differently; in the bathroom of somebody’s party, a beautiful boy or girl between us, bringing each other the culmination with our villainy, that would all happen eventually (eating together is perhaps not as tender for us as it is for you, and this is the obvious failure in my analogy). But not yet. No, not yet. For now, I’m telling you about this, and I want to tell you in order. I want steadiness. Consistency. I want to look up from my piano and see him double-taking at my band through a haze of smoke and noise guitar, making placid small-talk with my human friends, to have him pretend to drink a beer while not quite leaning against me. I had things to do, I’ve always got things to do, and I was playing with the band, remember, so I would have a band practice, or recordings to make, or something to figure out on the piano. Sometimes he’d come home when I was doing that. That was my favorite kind of theatre, watching them understand Louis as a fixture of my life, as if he were really real now, because it always takes humans to make us real. You know that. Oh, don’t. What else are you doing here? Really ask yourself that, ask yourself why I’ve invited you.

 

Ask yourself how you could possibly be interested in these banalities. Are you? Does it interest you to know about us walking the dog a second time, going book-shopping, watching a film, driving aimlessly around the Gulf Coast, to Florida or Biloxi or Dauphin Island, and once to Matamoros in Mexico, but never to NOLA, no matter how that highway beckoned us whenever we were on it? Does it interest you to know that if I had a gig we’d go to it, and if there was a party afterwards we’d visit it (and I loved that too – he was so _good_ at this milieu. He was made for it, being quiet and weary as he is, but also shabby and effortlessly pretentious, which is so fashionable in this time. I’d been joking when I'd called him King of Hipsterdom during our first week of honeymoon fucking, but after a few of these parties, I really did wonder if he deserved that crown). Later we’d often fuck again, naturally, but with far less insistence than we’d previously done, because you can relax about a thing when you’ve got all the time in the world to do it. Sometimes not even that – sometimes once was enough in an evening, and sometimes no times at all, because we were busy doing other things. I don’t know what to tell you about that. There was a tranquil period during the spring and beginning summer of 2010 in which no disaster could really make an impact upon us, in which nothing serious could really intrude. That was all. It was a tranquil period, we did almost nothing with it, and in consequence almost nothing happened to us.

 

It really was terribly boring, is what I’m attempting to tell you about that time. It was sitcom boring; tedious, repetitive, scripted, nothing original about it at all. Our nights drifted by as if air and water, as inevitable as the tides or the kinds of reactions the unimaginative will have to creative industry. It was boring. I was bored. And I utterly adored it. And so do you. Don’t you? You like imagining romance between us, unhurried, respectful tenderness interspersed with moments of high emotion. Don't you. I suppose that’s why I’m telling you. Isn’t it?

 

And if perhaps it’s obvious to you that something simmered under our performance of domestic bliss (or de facto, fashionable, bohemian bliss if you prefer) then you may consider yourself more adept at reading foreshadowing than I was. I should have read it, I know. I should have been far more cautious about the fact that things had ostensibly changed when they ostensibly did. In the Gospel According to Louis, everything we were doing was sin, and I knew that. And yet. Sometimes I tell myself that I must have known, and that the secret was my putting it deliberately out of my mind. But I don’t think that’s true. I think, if I am as honest with you as I have promised to be, I actually forgot. Enough at least to make the fact that we’d done this sort of thing before fade away from me, even though that had been even more obvious than what we were doing now, and we had been even worse at it. There was some influence upon my forgetting too, because of the therapist, and because of Louis’ pockets of strange sympathy, and his softness to me, reading me books, allowing me moments of failure and cruelty. I had the sense I was being forgiven a lot of things, and as much as I wanted to protest that, and to reject it, I found myself sinking into it as if a warm ocean.

 

Even the fucking was different. In contrast to our week of unbroken passion, this was a marked distinction in fucking, and unlike anything I had anticipated. Steady, and unhurried, and something that involved practical dialogue, of the sort about what is to be done with things and where to do them. There were patches of awkwardness in that, but they seemed to add to its loveliness rather than taking it away. How strange that was. How mundane. On one memorable occasion, as I recall, we played with each other’s cocks, without much fornicatory success, but with a great deal of intimacy. And it was the intimacy that mattered to me then, not the function. It was still nice – sensitivity in layers, just not much effect from it – and really? I let myself be satisfied with that? I let myself be happy with such a banal, boring, patently uninteresting state of affairs? I wasn’t happy for long, not even that night, but I was happy _then_ , and I want to tell you that. I've got to show you. How fleeting everything is, and why sitcoms are important, why the desire for narrative resolution is such that it must always be forced or invented, because my reflection upon it, frankly, disgusts me a little. “After all,” I said, lying on my stomach, attempting to add a little philosophical gravity to the situation of my failing to suck him off, “what else are we doing?” That’s something I really said. Or would have said, I suppose.  

 

It made him laugh. Easy. Pleasurable. I’ve told you this already, I think, that for a brief period, a few months, a good deal of 2010, it was so easy to make him laugh, and I did it often. He had slipped his pillow up against the headboard, and leaned on it (it was his pillow now, his own apartment having become more like a closet he periodically visited to pick up books), and he looked down at me, his face flushed, his hair messy. He laughed, and I loved him. 

“Do you ever miss it?” I asked him. “The human kind of sex, I mean. Fucking in the original sense. O.G. fucking?”

 

I don’t think he understood the reference (it is to the Los Angeles Crips, by way of Ice-T’s _Power_ ), but that didn’t matter. “Sometimes,” he said. “I think it’s easy to romanticize something you can’t have, don’t you? The human condition, as they say.”

I looked at him, raising one eyebrow and folding my hand under my chin until he laughed again. “Or, well… I don’t know." he said. "We’re still human in that way, there’s no meaningful distinction.”

“Consumers,” I lilted. Sing-song, teasingly. But his expression was fond, and I hadn’t managed to insult him. His lips had parted as if he meant to say something, but had forgotten it. “But there is,” I said, and they came together. “I want everything. I even want the things I have. I want to know I really have them.”

“Wouldn’t that imply that you don’t think you have the things that you have?”

“No,” I said. “But I suppose I was always like that. Even when I was alive. I was ambitious, you know, I've always been ambitious.”

“Were you?” he asked, and I recognized it, this kind of conversation. Sweet, and easy, and done solely to fill up the space between us. And I didn’t mind. I didn’t mind!

“I would have loved to sleep with you when we were both living,” I said, impulsively.

“I’m not sure you would have,” he said.  His smile, though constant enough, took on a subtle shade of what I thought was sheepishness. It was the sort of expression that made me interested. I might have grinned. I might have cocked an eyebrow again.

“Why?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

 

He’d stopped laughing now, but just barely. I took one of his hands and extended his arm from his body, holding it in the air in the motion of leading a dance. I did this to examine him, I think. His arm was – is – very thin, but lightly muscled, and for a moment I wondered what it would have looked like if he hadn’t been dying when I’d met him, and if I hadn’t already been dead. I held him there for a moment, then guided his hand toward me.

“Why, though?”

“Because,” he said, “most of my interest was in my own gratification.”

I didn’t have time to stop myself. I burst out laughing. His own expression was deadpan, which made everything so much worse. “You were a selfish lover!” I howled, and he shrugged.

“I was, I think.”

“I’m sure you’re judging yourself too harshly,” I said, but it was difficult. Speaking, I mean. Because I was laughing. But I was also - almost, I think - interested, and so I tried not to. At least, I tried to be quiet enough to hear him talking.

“No, I don’t think so," Louis said. "It’s easy to disregard the feelings of others, in the kind of state I was in. I think that’s what I did. I'm not sure I remember all of it.”

 

That hadn't helped. I could hear myself snickering. “It would be just like you to feel guilty about sex that probably wasn’t even bad, with people who aren’t even alive anymore.”

“And I drank,” he said, matter-of-factly. I didn't stop laughing at that either. Not straight away, anyway. But I kissed his palm to quiet myself, and he closed his eyes when I did, and there was a little movement in my heart at that gesture, and eventually, it worked. Call it a flutter (it’s not as if this chapter has much to offer me in the way of dignity anyway). How disarrayed he’d seemed, yet how graceful even in that, his desultory alcoholism, his relentless despair. I remembered that. What an easy mark I’d been.

“Drinking on the whole is not very conducive to…”

“Keeping it up,” I said, because he’d trailed off. He snorted, and made an incredulous face.

 

“Don’t look at me like that,” I said. “I was human too. I know about that. And when you’ve drunk so much that you can’t come forever and it just keeps going and going and there’s chafing afterwards.”

“You remember that?” he asked. Carefully, I thought. Very carefully. Did he want to keep himself from flushing? From something sad? Or from laughing? Was it serious, or funny? I wished I could think of something to say that would really make him really tell me, that would make him really laugh in a way he wasn’t in charge of. None of these tender expressions of intimacy. None of this quiet affection. I folded his hand to the bed-sheet now, holding it. Stroking it.

“I remember,” I said. “I remember that human sex had its own complications. Nobody likes an indiscriminate, drunken pounding. It’s boring, there isn’t anything to do.”

 

It worked. Genuine laughter, just as I’d wanted. I grinned. “We could, I think,” I told him, and I meant it wickedly, and it was pleasurable to say, it was pleasureable to keep pushing at it. “Maybe, I mean, I’m not sure how much or what it would take to do it deliberately, but I’ve been hard since. It’s happened.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “Yes, I remember. ‘Poised as if ready for what it would never again know how to do or want to do, marble, a Priapus at a gate.’ Of course you’d write that down, as if anybody could possibly want to know about that.”

“You did,” I pointed out. “That sounds like an exact quote.”

“It is one.”

I grinned again. “I love it when you quote me.”

“You’re very quotable,” he said, and his expression was smug and decorous and very charming. 

“I love it that you quote _that_. The dirtiest part in the book. Trust you. As if anyone wants to know, you say, as if you don’t, and yet you’ve remembered it exactly.”

     

 

Another laugh. I’d snaked up beside him now, reaching my hand over his body.

“I’d like to fuck you like that,” I said. “Would you like it, if I could?”

I think by now, his laugh had actually turned into a kind of giggle, though it’s difficult to use a word like that for Louis, because he managed to make it look dignified, even if by definition it wasn’t. He was pink now, his hand on his mouth, staring at me as if I’d do something amazing. His eyes were so green. They still are, probably.  
  
“Has it happened since?” he asked.

“I don’t know, once or twice. I’ll be sure to pay attention from now on. I’ll let you know if anything comes up.”

I could feel the laughter in his body before I saw it. His face was so smooth – that was power, and age, I thought, but also the fact that he’d smiled so seldom in his human life that he didn’t really have smile-lines - that his face seemed actually altered by its coming. Lovely, but what an insufficient word that was for him, and all of the other metaphors are just so overdone, and so awful. I used one of them now, or at least a poetic embellishment. “You’re so beautiful,” I said. “I think you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

“I think you exaggerate.”

“I don’t,” I told him. “There isn’t an exaggeration for you. You’re perfect.”

 

He smiled at that. Broadly.

“And so easily flattered.”

“You’d really like to…”

“Oh, yes.”

“What if I could do it?”

“Maybe you can.”

“I don't know if I…”

“Well, you should put your mind to it.”

"Is it that simple?"  
  
"No," I said. "I don't know what made it happen. Blood, probably. The right kind of blood. Did it happen when I..."  
  
  
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Not a thing to say in this moment. Not a memory to recall. But Louis hadn't noticed, or hadn't seemed to, at least as far as his unreadable, smiling face betrayed. His laughter softened, I thought, but perhaps I imagined that. I had. Surely I had. "I wasn't quite paying attention," he told me. And giggled. I was pushing up against him now, grinning. Some of that was out of relief, but most of it, as should be obvious to you, wasn't.   
"Weren't you?" I said.

“Would you like it if I could?”

“What I’d like,” I said, low, almost growling, “right now, is to hold you down, so you can’t get away. I'd like to hurt you.”

Louis’ laughter stopped. Abruptly. As if someone had taken the needle off the record. His eyes widened, his lips came together, he fell silent, and I felt it. Stupid. Stupid! I should have known better than to use words in place of action. I looked away from him. “Or, you know," I said. "Whatever.”

I could feel him watching me. I felt his hand move against mine, observed him making minor movements in my peripheral vision. He was trying to see my face, I think, but I wouldn't let him. Then, “what’s that expression, monsieur?” he said, in the quietest of possible tones, and I looked back at him without even thinking. Stupid. At least he seemed reassuringly placid now. Perhaps I'm imagined that look of shock as well? Don't you snap at him, I told myself. Don't do that. Don't you dare.

“What expression?”

“This expression."  
  
  
I didn't answer. I'd pulled back from him, I slid my hand under his, splayed his fingers, and threaded my own between them. Drew his arm out again, brought it back, drew it out again. He stopped me by grasping my fingers tightly.  
“Love you,” I said, quickly. Because I had to. He frowned.  
  
“I know," he said. "That isn’t what I asked you.”

"So what?"

“Lestat,” he said. “What are you thinking?”

“I am thinking appropriate, erotic thoughts about doing things to you. Shouldn’t I be?”

“Forgive me, but it doesn’t seem as if you are.” 

“Why does it matter so much what I’m thinking every second? There’s a reason you can’t read my mind, you know. Some of it should be a mystery.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. He frowned.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t look at me like that, then. What about _your_ expression? If we're doing that.”  
  
  
He ignored my saying that, I think, because nothing about his gaze changed, though he did shift a little in his position. He pushed up against the headboard, mostly. Not in uncomfortable way, though. More, he seemed distracted. “It’s just interesting. That you’d ask to do that.”

I didn’t know if he meant the gesture was interesting, or that my asking about it instead of just doing it was. I suspected the latter. I also didn’t know if I liked being interesting, and I said so. “I don’t like being interesting.”

“Yes, you do,” he said.  “That’s exactly what you like. Sexual violence, and being interesting.”

 

I froze. Only for an instant, but long enough to realize what he'd said to me. How was it that I’d learned new facial expressions when I didn’t know what they looked like? I could feel my face moving, making something wide-eyed and unfortunately vulnerable, and it felt unfamiliar to me, awkward. My body might have moved also, I thought I felt it contracting. “Shut up,” I said. “I mean it.”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“You are too. You say you’re not saying anything, but you are. Just because you’re not speaking doesn’t mean you’re not saying anything.”

His mouth twisted, as if he couldn’t tell whether to laugh or protest, but his eyes seemed tender. Or maybe they did. They also seemed something else. I couldn't work that out either. “I do love you,” he said, finally.

“I know that,” I said, petulantly. “Love isn’t an excuse for passive-aggression,” and he decided upon laughter. It came out in a resigned, brief burst. “Lestat…” he said.  
“That was mean,” I told him.

“I’m sorry.”

  
For a moment, I thought he’d put his hand to my face, turning it towards him again, but he hadn’t had to. He was only looking at me, and that, and the tone of his voice had felt like a touch, and I had turned of my own accord.  
“Let me,” I said. “Let me do it.”

“Let you do what?”

“Hold you down. If you’re not saying anything, then let me do it.”

Louis was propped on his elbows by now, still looking at me. He seemed to be searching my face, but I couldn’t really read him then either. Like a book, I thought, except closed. I felt very naked, even though I wasn't. “Don’t you want me to?”

“It’s not that I don’t want you to. I do want you to.”

“Well, then what?”

“I’m not sure.”   

“Is it serious?”

“No, not really, but…”

“But what?”

“I don’t know.”

 

I didn't know either. I didn’t know how to say what I really wanted to. Perhaps I should have just put it into simple words, exactly as I thought them? _This is weird, Louis_ , I would have said, if I could have. If I could possibly have said that. _Everything about this is Goddamned weird._ “Perhaps it frightens you,” I said, instead.

“Why should it?”

“I don’t know either. But does it?”

“No. I said I wanted you to.”  

That was a lie. I can’t read his mind, I know that, but I have known him for two hundred years. And I’m a narrative writer. And a pathological liar. And Louis isn’t always easy to read, but a lie that obvious, I recognize it. “You’re lying,” I said.

“I’m not lying.”

“Why then, are you…”

 

Louis frowned. “Must you ruin everything by patronizing me? I told you what I think, and what I wanted you to do. Don’t correct me, please.”

Don't shout at him, I told myself. That surge of real anger, that stab of rage that's come to you at his arrogance, don't you put it in words. Fucking cunt, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. Instead, I took hold of his wrists, one in each hand. “So if I just… if I just hold you as you did me, if you won’t move and then I…”

“There’s no need to be so reticent,” he told me. It sounded firm. “Describe it, if you want to. I’m giving you permission to do it, you don’t need to be coy in talking about it.”

That he’d called me coy made me smile. Not a nice smile, but a smile nonetheless. It would do. I leaned forward and kissed the side of his face. “Alright, petit," I said. "Chill out.” And I expected him to react to that, either sheepishly or with some discomfort at my colloquialism, but he didn’t.  What a strange expression he wore now, determined, hard. _This is weird_ , I thought, again, because it was. Don't shout, I told myself, again.

“Do it,” he said.

 

I gripped his wrists, tightly. Tighter. Felt his flesh soften as if I were bruising it. He reacted to that. I saw his eyes widen again, his lips parting this time. The tips of his white fangs. How like hunting it is, I notice, transcribing it now. In a moment like that, I am watching him like a predator. Anticipating everything, seeing every movement. Possibly he is a little frightened. I think I can hear it in his breath. It's shallow. Anticipatory. But I hadn’t noticed that I’d been looking at him like prey without really looking at Louis until he moved his eyes to mine, and the terror I saw there sent something shooting through me like mercury.

 

Definitely fear. Absolutely fear. Honest-to-God abyssal fear, visible in his eyes, in the silent communication between us, no matter how else his body might show it to me. God, but I felt that. Hot, and overwhelming, and jagged, and I moved quickly, jerking his arms upward, pushing him against the headboard and the wall. His back arched. His back arched as if I were _hurting him_ , and his body moved as if he were _letting me_ and my blood pushed against the boundary of my skin.

“Alright?” I asked him. Not saying what I wanted to. Not saying what I could have said: you’re afraid of me, you’re afraid of me, Louis. And you should be. "Is this what you want?"

“Yes.”

 

Liar. I could see it. That expression again. Terror. It electrified me. It troubled me. It opened channels in me I hadn’t known I had. I pushed his arms back harder, transferring my holding of his wrists from two hands to one. I drew my other hand along his chest. Softly at first. Then, placing my thumbnail against the skin of his neck, I thrust it in, drew it downwards, and sliced a gash in him.  
  
  
He winced. And the air in the room changed instantly. One moment, I breathed of the flat scent of existence, of jasmine and exhaust through the open window, and the next, the metallic, knife-edged heat of his sainted blood. Curse this new blood! I thought, putting my mouth against the gash. It had closed already. I could lick only the merest drop from it.

 

When I did it, when I bent forward, I heard him wince again, sharply, since in a way that seemed abrupt and out of proportion. It made me look up. His eyes were wide still, but they were different, and I kept looking at him, and I kept looking at him until suddenly, he let out a shuddering breath, and began to cry.

 

In a way, I was relived.

 

I mean it. I’ve already told you how much Louis used to cry. It was always. About everything. But here in Mobile, he hadn’t, which wouldn’t have mattered so much if not for the fact that I had. And because I don’t usually. At least, never in front of him.

  
But I had. And I’d gotten used to that, sort of. That uncomfortable memory of his wiping my cheeks clean of blood, following which I had kept it together to drive home, but then had crumbled again when we got there. I didn’t tell you about that. A little, as I recall, but not all of it. I will now: I went down, and it took him some time to react, and not because he was angry with me, but because it confused him. I could see that on his face, even if I couldn’t see much else. I think he had understood my instability with his intellect, and not with the rest of him because to see it, still, even less than an hour later, was difficult, and he stood there with wide eyes and his same permanently troubled expression, staring at me as if he couldn’t fathom what I was. Imagine, I wanted to say, imagine how I fucking feel! I’m not the sort of person who has breakdowns, Louis, don’t you know how embarrassing this is? I would have said that. But I hadn’t. I’d been too busy crying.

  
And eventually he’d come. Eventually he’d stepped across the room and put his arms around my waist and leaned against me, unsure and supplicated, and then more forcefully. Eventually he’d pressed me tightly against his body. Eventually we’d gone to bed and had our honeymoon. I’d gotten used to that. I’d come to accept that memory. But not truthfully, apparently. Because when Louis cried, the first thought I had about it was that at last, thanks be to everyone relevant, the balance of power was returning to normal. 

  
At least my second thought was more charitable. It had to be, I suppose, since it came against such a wall of blank fury. First relief, and then, _then_ I remembered what I’d been doing. I’d been about to bite him, I’d been _about to bite him_ and then this, then _Louis_ , and the way Louis always was about everything, hitting me in the chest, enveloping me in something that felt violent enough to be primal. It took effort to feel charity against that. That was something I felt in my fingertips.

  
But I managed it. Just. I got control of it. I didn’t force him back any further. I didn’t lunge. I pulled back, releasing his wrists, putting my arm around his shoulder. I took his hand. I squeezed it perhaps a little too tightly, but I did it well enough under the circumstances. “Louis,” I said. “Louis? Louis.” My voice was gentle. I think it was gentle.

  
Maybe it wasn’t. “Stop,” he said, finally. “It isn’t…” he took a breath, but it didn’t seem to help anything. “It’s not…”

I wanted to rush him. He must have known that. But he didn’t do anything about it. He wasn’t going to. Don’t break his hand, I told myself. Push it down. Put it aside. Don’t hurt him. “Louis?” I said again. “It’s not what? Louis?”

“It’s not…” he said. And then he sucked in his breath. He brought his other hand to his mouth and turned to look at me. His eyes are too wide, I realized. Too big for his face. It makes his expressions seem more significant than they actually are. His face was streaked and terrible, and the blood so powerfully sharp I could barely breathe, and stop being so damned symbolic, I wanted to yell at him. Stop making me smell this if you don’t want me to do something about it.

  
But I didn’t do something. I didn’t do anything. I kissed his temple, barely, holding my fangs in my mouth. Only my lips touched his skin. How did I do that? Who was it, doing that? Would he feel my restraint or only the result of it? “What’s the matter?” I said. I even think I sounded tender.  

It didn’t matter anyway. He bit his lip, wouldn’t answer. “Really,” I prompted. “Really.”

“Purgatory,” Louis said.

  
That’s actually what he said, or at least what I remember him saying. I know my fingernails went into his flesh slightly, just out of irritation, but I stopped myself before it was really serious. It occurred to me to laugh at him instead, but for reasons unknown, I found I couldn’t even do that. I probably did sound incredulous when I spoke, because I was, but that was all I could allow myself to do.

“You’re upset about purgatory?”

“… whether I’d recognize it…”

“You’re upset about _purgatory?_ ”

“Purgatory isn’t supposed to be terrible,” he said. “It’s only an interim.”

  
  
Ordinarily, I’d have been sarcastic about that. Ordinarily, I’d have arched my eyebrow, I’d have said something horrible. Yes, I know the doctrine too, I wanted to say. We’re all Catholics here. Or I’d have pointed out the joyous particularity of his being so Goddamned pretentious he could do it even in tragedy. He absolutely fucking deserved it too. But I didn’t do it! He’d taken his other hand away from his mouth, but he was still crying, and there was nothing I could do. His sobs were punctuated by short breaths, embarrassed, I thought, and shut up, I wanted to say. You’re irritating. But instead, I stroked my hand up and down his arm, and didn’t even tear into it.

  
It took some time for him to stop. At first I couldn’t tell if he was going to, but then his breath was more even, and then it was normal. He blinked. Sniffed. Brushed his hand over his cheek and dropped it. Looked away from me. Fissures in his body, I thought, but who put them there, Lestat? Who’s done that to him? “Louis,” I said. But I couldn't finish it. His bloody hand had stained my pillowcase a little, and that seemed arresting, halting in a way that I couldn’t explain.

  
This acknowledged, I did speak, eventually, and what I said was still a _little_ nasty. Give me a break, darling. I’m still me. So I did drawl out what I said sarcastically, but honestly, it was not nearly as sarcastically as it could have been. “Aren’t you going to talk about your feelings? If that’s what I’m supposed to do then you should as well. Sauce for the goose and all that.”

  
Louis looked at me. The blood was drying on his face now, the smell of it changing from something fresh and distracting to something dead and uninteresting. His was gaze steady, and ever so slightly withering.

“You are more than a little irritating,” he said, eventually.

I wished, for a moment, that I were wearing something dressier than a baseball shirt and no pants. “You shouldn’t be so rude to me. I’m trying to be nice.”

He snorted.

“I mean it. I’ve only got so much niceness in me. And what if I snap under the exertion? Then where will you be?”

  
  
A flash in his eyes. “You snapped a long time ago.”

“I thought I told you not to make jokes about that.”

“And I’ve asked you not to do any number of things, and you still do them.”

“That’s different.”

“It’s not different at all.”

“Louis,” I said, and my voice was definitely cruel now. I could tell by his face. I let it hang there, watching his eyes narrow and his shoulders tense, making him anticipate me. Then, I put on the therapist’s accent. “And how do you feel about that?”

It worked. “Oh, fuck you.” Louis said.

  
I felt a little bad. Not very bad, only as much as a momentary twinge at the recognition that I’d gone too far when apparently I’d been trying not to. But it was quickly replaced by annoyance at the fact that he hadn’t noticed my efforts. And then by further annoyance that I’d made such an effort at all. “I don’t like it when you curse,” I said.

“You don’t like it when I curse of my own accord. You have a particular image of me that has very little to do with anybody I’ve ever been. I dislike it. I am, in fact, as you are so fond of saying, actually a person.”

“I know, cher. We’re all consumers.”

Louis hissed. Like a cat. It was a little thrilling. I could feel myself getting interested again. Smiling. I tried to scrub it from my facial expression, but I doubt I managed entirely. In fact I know I didn't.

“It’s not a joke!” Louis said. “I don’t want to talk to you about any of this, not if you’re going to make fun of it.”

  
  
I let a moment pass before I responded to that. From the rigidity in his posture, I assumed he was just shy of furious. He might actually react if I tried something. I wanted it to be the right something.

“I’m sorry, darling,” I said. “Don’t be angry.”

“I’m not angry!” he snapped. “I’m frustrated!”

  
I didn’t answer, not even to correct him. I just looked straight at him until embarrassment took him and he dropped my gaze. His eyes went wide, and his breathing seemed forced and pained again, as if he were trying not to cry again.

“Louis…” I said.

“Just… I am sorry,” he told me. “It doesn’t require a performance like this. I can’t stop, I suppose. I thought I could.”

  
I put my hand back on his arm. I don’t know why, considering I’d been trying deliberately to piss him off only moments before, but it doesn’t matter. I couldn't decide what I was doing, it seemed, and besides, he didn’t notice. He only examined his bloody hand with apparent distaste.

“It’s frustrating!” he said. “I frustrate myself!”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” 

I wanted to sigh. That seemed faintly ironic to me, that it should be me sighing instead of him, but it was so on some distant level that I couldn’t quite get at, and I couldn’t be bothered with it. “Oh, chéri,” I said. It sounded kind. I wanted to recalibrate.

  
He did look at me then. He looked up, up into my face, smeared and disarrayed, the points of his fangs just visible. It wasn’t quite shock, I don’t think, though that was some of it. Funny, how even his tragedies were destined to seem erotic.

“Louis,” I said. “I don’t want you to cry.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t… don’t apologize. That’s not what I mean. Listen. So you’re angry. Good for you.”

“Frustrated.”

  
My hand stayed still, and I wouldn’t move it. Even if I could feel his skin under mine, and how easy it would be to pierce.

“Whatever. Listen. It makes… you know when you told me that it made it easier to forgive me but harder to anticipate me?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You’re not that confused, stop faking that you are. You know what I mean. Because anger… because I don’t like to be surprised by it.”

Louis made a shrug with his face. I suspected him of intending to end the conversation there, but I wouldn’t let him.

“No, listen to me. You don’t tell me, and then you get… well, you know what you get.”

  
Louis just stared at me. I don’t think he was pleased.

“I’m not making this up, Louis. The therapist said it.”

“What exactly did he say?”

“That you never say you’re angry until it’s too late.”  

“I don’t think that’s exactly what he said.”

“Louis,” I said. “It may not be a direct quote, but it’s close enough. Come on. This isn’t new information.”

“Too late for what?”

“Shut up,” I said. “You’re being defensive. I know defensive when I see it.”

“Expert that you are.”

  
“Shut up,” I said. “Stop it.”

“I’m not.”

“Oh, you are.”

“I am not being…”

“Louis,” I said, once, in a firm tone. It worked.

“I am,” he said, eventually. “I apologize.”

  
I leaned back against the headboard. I could feel myself assuming nonchalance, and in a way I almost felt it. The bodily performance was so ingrained as to actually guide my thinking. And my speaking. Mild sarcasm. My closest real approximation of tenderness. “What a hypocrite you are. Pointedly worrying about me as if I might implode at any moment, yet internalizing everything with nary a voiced concern. Does it get tiring, forbidding anyone ever to worry about you?” 

“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not that sort of crying. It’s fine, please don’t worry about it.”

I didn’t believe him. “But I don’t want to make you cry.”

  
There was a lot of silence between my speech and his next instance of it. Silence his expression inflected, silence enough that I remembered, and actually I think he meant me to remember, just how much of a lie that was. Then, he said one word, in a noncommittal tone. “Oh?” he said, and only that.

  
I wanted to throw up. It was a blunt-force trauma, so sudden that if I could have done it, I’m almost certain I would have. I looked down at his hand. Splayed his fingers out between mine, turned his hand over, rubbed his palm with my thumb. Again. Drew his hand out in front of us again. Moved my thumb again. All of it again. Again, forever. Something so fragile as he, naturally I would ruin it.

  
He stopped me by grabbing my fingers, and it was a sharp enough gesture that it made me start. I pulled my hand out of his, moved away from him.

“What?” he said. Oh, but the noncommittal tone was gone now. This had an edge to it.

“Louis, I don’t want you to _feel like crying_.”

“Alright,” he said.

“Well, do you?”

“I did, it’s fine now.”

“I mean,” I said, “I mean generally.”

He blinked.

“I love you,” I said. “I do. It’s just that you do so tend to melancholia and if you’re going to be a depressive… I don’t… I… Louis. I wish you wouldn’t…”

  
Nothing. And nothing. And nothing, and it seemed it would go on for hours. I didn’t know how to put it properly, and I’d have given up on it entirely had he taken his eyes off of me for even one instant. He hadn’t, however.

“I’ve got reason to worry about you, haven’t I?” I said. “Historically, you are… well, your actions have been… worrying.”

I heard the petulance in my own voice when I spoke. I wonder if that’s why he took pity on me, because he did speak then.

“I couldn’t die now if I wanted to."

“But you do want to.” 

  
He sniffed. I could see the dried blood cracking on his skin, flaking. Ghoulish, I thought. It looked like a death mask. He looked dead already, his face utterly flat and his hands folded. Sometimes, I think, on rare occasions, there is advantage to the fact that we cannot hear each other’s thoughts. “No," he said. "No, I think I’m reasonably content.”

  
I don’t know what I was doing through all of this. Sitting in stillness, I suppose. “That’s reassuring.”

“It’s just difficult to talk about. Having worked up my courage, only to have it…”

I thought his eyes had welled up again, but I couldn’t be sure, since he wasn’t looking at me. Then he was. His eyes glistened, but no tears fell “You know,” he said.

  
I know that the last time we talked about that it made you furious, I thought but didn’t say. And then I did say it. “Is that why? Because you’re still angry with me about that?”

Louis frowned. He looked as if he were thinking it over. He bit his lip. Then he said, “that’s some of it. Sometimes I am, yes.”

  
He didn’t say it to be cruel, that much was obvious. It had been frank for the sake of frankness, and not at all loaded to wound. I should not have taken it as the blow I did, and I knew that even then. So I said nothing. Well, I said, “oh.”

“Look,” Louis told me, “don’t take it like that. It’s not… you asked me, and I’m telling you. It obviously isn’t prohibitive or I wouldn’t… but probably that is some of the difficulty with…”

“Sex?”

“No!” he snapped. “Not everything is about sex!”

This is, though, I thought but didn’t say. Instead I said, “everything good is,” but he ignored me.

  
“Purgatory,” he said. “I wonder if, it’s having the very thing that you have always wanted, and yet never wanted, at the same time.”

“I don’t… I don’t understand.”

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry for that. It’s not the sort of thing you think about, it’s not the sort of person you are.”

  
  
Oh, fuck you, you smug asshole, I thought, though I barely managed not to say it. _Barely._ “You think I don’t know about these things, Louis. I do.”

“What things do you know about?” he said. And it wasn’t a question, and the reprieve I’d given him because of his sadness was over.

“Oh, fuck you,” I said. Aloud. _Nice_. “You’re such a pretentious ass. I think you manufacture these entire situations solely to humiliate me on the grounds of not being sufficiently ‘deep’. I think about things, alright? I’m a fucking novelist.”

“Ostensibly.”   

“Why are you doing this?!” I shouted. “Are you trying to make me angry? Because you are, you unbelievable fucking prick.”

  
Louis looked almost sorry, beneath the blood. At least I thought he did, with his brow wrinkling, his tender, probably false sympathy unwittingly lancing my immanent fury. He can’t help it, I told myself. He’s like a person from a book. He’s a Byronic hero. He really is. Everything is misery. Listen to what he says:

“Oh, monsieur,” he said. “I apologize for this. A howling contemplation of nothingness. I’ve made you sad, I’m so sorry. You’ll forgive me.”

“I’m not sad!” I shouted. “Goddamn it, I’m angry! You’re being an ass, and I’m angry!”

  
He didn’t speak, only stared. It seemed vacant again. Dead. You’re a dead thing! I wanted to shout! And fuck you and fuck off and _why are you being like this_! But I didn’t. I didn’t shout anything, and I don’t know why. His face stopped me, I suppose. Because it was impossible to do anything with his staring at me like that. As if I wasn’t really there. As if he were looking right through me and straight into the open gates of purgatory. Not Hell, either. Had it been Hell he’d have been fearful. He wasn’t.

  
I don’t know what kind of expression I made in return, but it must have been something, because he came back into focus as if I’d flipped a switch, and then, suddenly, it felt sudden, I felt his hand against my face, and his fingers in my hair.

I didn’t know what to say. “How can you…”

“It’s in my nature,” he said, quietly. “Cruelty. You’re not the only one who knows how to do that.”

I wasn’t fooled. “Why?”

“Sometimes I’m mean.”

“That’s not an excuse, Louis! Fuck!”

“Ssh,” he said.

“Don’t you shush me, Louis. So help me…”

  
I might have kept shouting, but he kissed my cheek. He leaned forward to do it, and he closed his eyes when he did, inhaling softly, breathing out. “Don’t,” I said, but it didn’t work. He put his arms around me, about my waist, and pulled me towards him. I buried my face in his shoulder. “Don’t,” I said, again, though muffled as it was, I’m not sure he could hear me. For a disorienting moment, held there, I felt as if I were of trifling size. He was so slight that had we both had human strength I could have easily torn him apart, but this softness made me feel it was impossible.

“I know it’s not,” he said, and I couldn’t speak to respond to it.

“I know it’s not an excuse,” he said, again. My own hands were pressing into his back. He smelt like he always had. And then, he kissed my cheek again, and then my mouth.

  
I don’t know how I hadn’t moved. I hadn’t stopped being angry. So what if he’d kissed me? So what if I’d hesitated, not just in response, but in everything? So what if he’d kissed me again, lightly, but with an open mouth? A real kiss. A loving one, brief, but gentle and tender, and he meant it, I had known him for two hundred years. I could tell. Or if he kissed me again, at the top of my ear? This time just a peck, just a little one, just close enough that I could feel his hot breath in my ear. I squeezed him. And not to hurt. Eventually, he kissed me again, open-mouthed again. Limitless.

  
When it broke, I found was snaking my hand under his shirt again. His body was cold but so, so familiar, and accented by the residual warmth of our having moved around in the bed. I ran my hand over his chest, over the fine, spare hair, bringing it to rest over his heart. It sat there easily, over that hollow in his body, and I could feel the facsimile of his living. Not a dead thing after all. But nothing further. I knew what was happening. I wouldn’t let him fondle his way out of it.

  
Even if he stroked me a little more, and I let him, burrowing my nose into his neck. Even if the way his hands gripped my waist, my back, was so sweet and so gentle. Even if I could feel his chest moving with each low sigh. I wouldn’t forgive him. I wouldn’t forgive anything. I wasn’t going to, I swear I wouldn’t have done. I wouldn’t have done anything had he not slid one finger into the collar of my baseball shirt, pulled it gently away from my neck, and bit me there, and began to drink.

  
I was so angry when he did that! So angry! I can't even think of a better word. Angry enough to have shoved him back, to break his bones, to do the kind of violence I’d only threatened until now. He absolutely deserved it, he deserved to be thrown off and beaten up. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t push him away! I couldn’t yell! The puncture happened so easily, and his fangs had slid in so perfectly and drinking was insistent, but not rough, and his fingers were tight but not pressing and I couldn’t even cry out. I wanted to. I wanted to yell. Feeding on me! But I couldn’t. All I could do was whimper, and push closer to him, and let him do it.

  
When he pulled away, his mouth was bloody. I don’t know what kind of face I was making in response. I really don’t remember. I just remember looking at him and seeing his lips parted and red and hating him for it, but breathing hard and fast, and feeling my skin sing and my own blood lapping at me. I tried to say something then, I think. That I’d stained him, that I’d finish him, whatever it was I could feel my mouth open to speak. But I didn’t. I don’t know what sounds came out of me. I managed, I think, a vibrating near silence, and no words at all.

  
He didn’t say anything either. For a moment, we only looked at each other, sitting on our knees in the middle of the bed. And then he put out his arms and I fell into them and he bit me again. I felt pain as the wound re-opened. A glancing pain, for an instant, because then rapture. Then the puncture was nature and truth, then it had always been there. I knew I’d begun to claw him. I wasn’t paying particular attention to it. My hands seemed aimless and without use, such ancillary appendages to what I really was; concentrated, quiet wildfire. That was everything I was. “Louis,” I said, in a breath. He pulled back again. He looked worried. “Don’t cry,” he said.

“I’m not.”

“Haven’t you noticed?”

“I’m not.”

  
A frown. “You…” he started to say, but he seemed to think better of it. His hand against my face, and it did feel wet, but of course it did, he was draining me. His movements were slow enough that it took me some time to remember he had been draining me. I felt fear for an instant, and then I dismissed it (or didn’t care, or liked it, I don’t know). Hair behind my ears. My neck again. I felt my heart starting in earnest, registered it barely. Oh, monstrous machine. Pumping to keep yourself alive. I’d closed my eyes. Felt him press on top of me. We’d lain back by now.

  
When he moved in the right way, I bit his shoulder. I couldn’t do it savagely. I felt him start anyway, but it had been so gentle, my entire being shivering at the threshold of real, vicious violence, the points of my fangs only just puncturing, only just sliding into his flesh. Why had I done that? Did I want to? Would he feel my restraint or only the results of its effort? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I only cared about feeling him, about feeling the tumble of his softest intentions, feeling his heartbeat, feeling everything come into sync.  

  
I don’t have to tell you what it’s like. I already have. It’s routine by now. Glorious routine, yes, like a syncopated record, like a canon and a perfect contrapunctal, resolving and resolving toward centre, but routine. Each thought a little explosion. Each contact a vibrating warmth. Each reset and reset and reset until finally, finally, our exchange of blood flowed together like a black, black river of the quietest warm water, of the quietest fire, like the silent combustion of an expensive car. Our fingers were knotted together, no longer even a need for any restraint. His body against me was hard.  

  
I died honestly. Like a dam had been opened inside me, the water relentless in both directions. My body was filled and it was empty all at once, and I had no idea how it could be so sharp or so flattening. I left my body for minutes. Hot and sweet, trembling minutes during which the only things that existed were the limits of my body at their contact with his, and the diffuse, painted wash of my contented soul, seeming to fill up the universe. My anger seemed stupid now, as much as I could remember it. There was no place in my body to put it, not in this calm nothingness.  
  
  
Then I felt his fangs leave my neck, felt mine leave his, and I sank, or collapsed, back into the world. When I opened my eyes, we were wrapped up in each other, pink and bloody and stained, bodies against the sheets, and his own eyes closed. I seemed minutes before I could speak. Maybe hours. Maybe I’d never be able to speak again. Maybe nothing would shatter this perfect, perfect quietness.

  
I did speak though. Of course I did. I couldn't be quiet forever, not me. Mon Dieu, if only.

 

Not only that, what I said was appallingly mundane. “Don’t go to sleep, chéri,” I said.  “We’ve got session.”

 

“Mmm,” Louis said in response, making it apparent to me that he had already started sleeping. I squeezed his shoulder.

“Wake up.”

“I’m awake,” he said. “I’m awake.”

“Don’t go to sleep.”

“I said, I’m awake.”

“Liar,” I teased him. “You’re like a cat, you’ve got such a knack for sleeping. You could sleep in a thunderstorm.”

 

His eyes were still closed, but he unfolded a sheepish smile anyway. “I’d prefer not to move at all, honestly.”

“I know,” I said. “You were always lazy.”

He smiled at that too.  His tousled hair made him seem exactly like an animal, a black and white cat, with its mouth bloody, fresh from the kill. He moved away from me and pulled the covers up around himself when I petted him, but I followed him, spooning him from behind, and he obviously didn’t really mind.

“I don’t want to move either,” I said, into his ear. It was a lie, but it was true in spirit. “I could cancel it, couldn’t I? We could stay here and watch films or something.”

“No, no,” he said. “We should go. We have things to talk about.”

 

“Have we?” I was teasing him still, I didn’t really expect him to answer. He did though. His eyes opened, and he turned his head, and he looked at me. For some time.

“Yes.”

I laughed. “Alright, then.”

“We do.”

“I said, alright. I hope you’re going to…” but what had we even been talking about? Oh, I know now, I’ve just written it, haven’t I? But back then, it seemed I honestly didn’t. “You know, if you want to… what?”

“Yes,” he said, again.

 

It made me smile again. How firm he was about it. I kissed him. “I suppose that’s our night, then. Shall we go driving, after? Or come home?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know how I’ll feel. Let’s not make plans.”

“Let’s be spontaneous?” I asked him. “Alright.”

“I’ll say definitively that I do want to come home eventually. I don’t want to end up in some strange town with none of my review novels.”

“You’re no fun,” I teased him. “But I do wish my mother would call. I feel we can’t go away now, because of that. What if we wanted to go on holiday?”

 

I could feel Louis’ hand over mine. “On holiday from nothing,” he said. “As if one needed a break from leisure.”

“I do,” I said. “I don’t like routine.”

“When is she coming?”

That tone again. I wasn’t imagining it. “I don’t know, she said it would be soon.”

 “Alright.”

“Louis,” I said. “What?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

 

His hand on mine was gentle, but firm, as if he were trying to hold me together through only his touch. The little devil didn’t like that, he didn’t like it at all. I pulled my hand out from his, leaning up. He had to roll onto his back to look at me, so I waited until he had.

“Yes,” I said, “it does. You have something to say. What is it?”

“I think it’s better discussed at session, don’t you?”

“No,” I said. “No, I do not. You are my… whatever… and this is our interim home, and not everything needs to be discussed in front of a third party. What is this tone you keep taking about my mother?”

“There really isn’t a tone.”

“Louis,” I said. “There’s a tone.”

 

He thinned his lips. “For such a dedicated exhibitionist, you can be so strangely reserved.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t like talking to the therapist, do you?”

“Nobody likes talking to a therapist,” I said. “The only people who do like it are tragic, self-indulgent wallowers. You know, like you are.”

 

I knew I’d been cruel, saying that. Of course I did. Even if I hadn’t known, I’d have seen it on his face. But I didn’t bother to retract it. His fault, for presuming to speak about Gabrielle. He should have known better. I could see he knew it too, obviously wanting to speak, and then not doing so.

 

I didn’t wait for him. I ignored his startled expression, threw the covers aside, and got up. Louis watched me, but I ignored that too, stripping off the baseball shirt, stalking into the bathroom to wash off the blood. Perhaps I shook the shirt off a little more provocatively than I might otherwise have done, but that was all I did. It didn't work, anyway. I heard him enter the bathroom while I was in the shower, but he didn’t get in with me. I supposed he’d cleaned up with a washcloth, in the sink, and I supposed that because he turned the hot tap on to do it and didn’t bother to warn me. That put me in a foul mood, though one I attempted to assimilate as justly deserved while blow-drying my hair. You really don’t _look_ like an asshole, I remember thinking of myself.   

 

But when I came out of the bathroom, he’d pulled on those same slim bluejeans, and his green shirt, and baggy cardigan. The little black boots too. I snapped at him. “Louis, what are you doing? Those are yesterday’s clothes. What happened to your cashmere sweater? The brown one.”

“It’s here somewhere. Leave me alone, would you? I’m perfectly capable of dressing myself.”    

“That cardigan is too big for you. We’ll go shopping after session.”

“Lestat,” Louis said. “That’s enough.”

 

I'd been told off, like a child. He said it with such finality that I might have blushed, had I been the sort of person who did that. Instead I concentrated on dressing. Fishing out my clothes. Buttoning my shirt. Fixing my cufflinks into place. Soft blue shirt, in Egyptian cotton. The better kind of shirt doesn’t have buttons at the cuffs.

“I just think,” I said, “someone as pretty as you, it’s a shame.”

“I know what you think.”

“And you never dress up for me.”

“I dress up for you frequently. I also, occasionally, wish to dress in a manner that I personally find comfortable. Not everyone feels the need to wear a suit to see their therapist.”

 

I hadn’t picked a suit consciously, but I wasn’t about to say so.  We were standing on opposite sides of the bed by this point. We looked at each other. Neither of us blinked.

“Would it kill you to run a comb through your hair?” I demanded.

“No,” he said. “But I don’t want to.”

 

I narrowed my eyes, buttoned my fly, and collected my jacket. He watched me put it on, and I couldn’t read that either. I knew how it looked. Fucking fabulous. He ought to have registered that, I thought. He ought to have said something. But he didn't. “Let’s go,” I said, eventually, and we did.

 

Do you want to know what we talked about on the way there? Or in the session itself? I don’t exactly remember. I do enough to tell the following part of the story, because it happened that that night we fought about it, but honestly, there is no better example of true routine than couples therapy. It isn’t that I don’t want to tell you what happened, it’s only that every fucking session was the exact fucking same from start to finish. I can no more describe an entire session than I can tell you about every raindrop in a downpour. It was the usual stuff, that's all you truly need to know. I know you think it wasn’t, and you think I’m lying. Or that something’s wrong with my memory. Well, you’re wrong about both because I remember everything I need to. I remember enough to tell you that on the way home from the therapist’s office, Louis slipped effortlessly into his ‘This Man Is An Island’ persona, and I hated it.  
  
I always hate it. He does it all the time, it’s one of his special talents, contriving to seem as if he is completely, completely alone in a space when in fact he has company. On the way home from the therapist's office, he sat inches from me in the passenger seat, silent as a tomb, content to comment on my psychology in relation to _The Eminem Show_ , to which we were listening, and equally content to refuse any question of his assessment. “It’s rather telling that you like this song so much,” was all he had said, speaking of ‘Cleaning out my Closet’. I yelled at him, obviously. And then he said nothing. The first thing since we’d left the therapist’s office, and then nothing at all. I hated it. Of course I hated it.

 

So I turned the music up. I would listen to Eminem until both of our eardrums burst, and I meant to make that point. Louis folded his arms again, though whether out of anger at my impudence or disinterest in me in general I couldn’t tell. He was concentrating on something outside the window. For a moment, he looked deceptively regular in his blue-jeans, like a college student, or an actual young person and not a two hundred year old blood-sucking monster. The rolled up sleeves of his cardigan had slipped down, over his fingers, and only a fraction of their white tips were visible. You should wear gloves, I wanted to tell him. If you won’t tan, gloves are necessary. But mostly I just hated him. For being able to do what he was doing – for being able to not speak.

 

So soon after romance, too. I'm sure you're appalled. I don't care, it's honesty: my capacity for hatred is not diminished by affection, nor by proximity or reason. He was pissing me off, and I hated him. That simple. Should I regard this as routine, or part of our new routine? Was it situation comedy? I wonder about that now, especially tonight after what I’ve been watching. Was this the joke that I, the writer of my own comedy series, was playing on us, and especially myself: sweetness, to bitterness, to sweetness, to argument again? The session hadn’t even been that bad, or at least I hadn’t thought so, at least as much as I remember. Heated, sure. Okay. You never tell me when you’re angry, I thought of saying. I thought of saying it cruelly. I wanted to smoke too, though for literally no reason at all, as it was impossible for me to be addicted to it. I suppose like anyone, I’m easily addicted to image. I was, of course, wearing my glasses.

 

Eventually we merged onto North Water Street from the I-10 West, passing the Museum, lit up against the night. Mobile fell into focus before us, the slave owner’s mansions and shotgun hovels forgotten by the freeway’s passage, all jumbled up in my memory as, all coming back to focus, alinging themselves into order. I thought to say that to Louis, and would have done if I hadn’t hated him. This is beautiful, isn't it? The order of this city, the memory of its having gone through untold evolutions and wars, disasters and economic upheavals, the French and the Yankees, and everybody living here and dying, taking little pieces with them when they went. Leaving only a Walmart and a staggering artscene. And the Wallmart, Jimmy tells me, is looking for a new manager because they have to make a better profit than the last year every year and nobody has been able to do it since Katrina. Don’t you think that’s beautiful, I might have said to him. Their industry? Maybe he’d have fought with me.

 

But in the seat beside me, Louis was absolutely still. That he had not moved, or acknowledged me since I had shouted, minutes ago, made me furious enough to forget it. The CD was finishing, and I hit “play” again without asking. I didn’t have to ask. I could anticipate the reaction Louis would give me. Louis, my dark beloved. Louis, my demon lover, I knew what he’d do. And he did it. Louis remained silent as the ‘Curtains Up’ skit began again and the curtains went up on the city of Mobile.

 

So be silent, I wanted to say to him. As if you said anything even while you were speaking. Your thoughts are meaningless. So let me drive as I’m driving, black against the tarmac, black car on black roads, the night’s busting open, these two lanes will take us anywhere. ‘Thunder Road,’ I could have played that, I could have changed the compact disc. He’d have liked it though. He’d have liked it if I’d played Springsteen instead of this.  And besides, we weren’t going anywhere, we were going home. So I didn’t.

 

So I concentrated on the road, but not really. So strange that this frustrating creature beside me could be the same animal who, when we were fucking only a few nights before, had let out a shuddering cry as if a defenseless, forlorn thing, so that my heart had broken for him. I had wrapped around him then, as tenderly as poured steel and decided that he was precious, that regardless of either of our wishes I should protect him always, do anything to keep him from harm. Now, mere nights later, only the last vestiges of my self-control prevented me from shoving him out of the car while it was moving. I even saw it in my mind’s eye, even. He’d shout, but it wouldn’t really hurt him. And hours later, he would let himself back into the flat, saying nothing to me, stalking into the bedroom and closing the door. I didn’t do it. I did smoke though. It’s my damned car, I prepared myself to say in response to his inevitable criticism, and I’ll do whatever I like in it. Louis wrinkled his nose, but said nothing, and that pissed me off more than it should have.

 

“Look,” I said, finally. His expression was beyond infuriating, and it stopped my train of thought on its tracks. “Just shut up about my mother,” I concluded.

I wanted to say more. I wanted to yell. You’re not allowed to talk about her, I’d have said. You’ve got no bloody idea and I hate you and shut the fuck up about everything. His voice had been so tender when he had spoken, but I wasn’t fooled.

“I have absolutely no desire to talk about your mother.”

“You could have fooled me.”

“There’s really nothing to say about her.”

“Then why do you keep bringing her up?”

“I don’t,” he said. “You do.”

Touché, I might have said, though I didn’t.  
“You brought it up with the therapist,” he pointed out.

“Yes, because he needed to know that you hate her.”

“I don’t… Lestat.”

 

I’d frustrated him. Good. It gave me pleasure. He turned away, in what seemed to me to be decorous disgust. I was too angry to care. There were, I noted, still gaps on the low lying edges of the town, still vacant lots and patches of silt and dirt where green spaces had been. Katrina had claimed territory here, and was slow to accede it, leaving another indelible mark on the history of the place. The album felt complete though, I thought, and I might say something about that, if I met him, if I were ever famous again. “I have listened to your album while driving for most of the oil war,” I could say, or something similarly profound and political. Something that made me either a war or a hurricane, either of which would have been appropriate. I tapped my cigarette against the glass of my open window.  

 

Or maybe I’d eat Tipper Gore for him, as a kind of gift. I had a parental advisory sticker too, but I’d never worried about it. I’d never worried about Katrina either, though, and look what had happened to my old hometown. When ‘White America,’ started, I thought about that, and Louis said nothing. Naturally, because he was Louis, he said nothing. After a few minutes of fuming silence, I turned off the CD. I meant that as a kind of vague apology, though not really. 

It worked anyway. “I don’t hate her,” Louis said, eventually. “As I have said, in session and outside of it, several times. I have nothing against Gabrielle. She and I like each other perfectly well. All I said was that…”  
  
“I know what you said.”

“Evidently you do not, as you have consistently misquoted me.”

“I have not.”

“Fine,” Louis said. His voice was firm. “Tell me what I said.”

I opened my mouth, and closed it again. He was right, I didn’t remember. But I wasn’t going to admit that, not if I lived a million years. And I probably will too, making the point all the more effective.

“Something stupid and offensive and ill-informed,” I said.

 

Louis sighed. I pitched my butt out of the window and buzzed it up.

“Must you smoke?”

“What do you care if I do? You won’t die of it, it’s just a fashion accessory.”

Louis said nothing, though his face said a lot more.

“What?”

“You do it because you’re nervous, I think.”

“I’m not nervous.”

“Anxious, then. Either way, you don't need to, and nobody is watching. It's a performance of nonchalance with absolutely no benefit, and no real audience. You’re not even really smoking it.”

“Oh, fuck you!” I snapped. “I am so sick of these hackneyed analyses. I am sick of this discussion. I am sick of fucking therapy. And I am especially sick of fucking you.”

 

Louis’ eyebrows went up. He stared at me flatly for a moment or so before turning his gaze to the window.

“What do you want from me?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. You started it, I wanted to say. Then I did. “You started it.”  
  
Nothing to that either. “Don’t sulk, Louis," I said. "It’s not attractive.”

“There’s really no need for you to smoke,” he said.

“Shut up."

“Or to wear glasses.”

“Just shut up! You won’t even comb your hair, and you won’t let me tell you, and then this! It’s such hypocrisy! It’s so irritating!”

“As you wish,” he said, but he still hadn’t looked at me. 

 

It occurred to me, when he said that, that Carey Elwes had used the same line in _The Princess Bride_ , and that that was how Buttercup had known that Westly the farm-boy was also the Dread Pirate Roberts. In my own life, probably, that line would be how I would know that Louis was also a jerk.  “Farm boy,” I muttered, “fetch me that pitcher.”

He didn’t laugh. Then again, I hadn’t expected him to. “Haven’t you seen that film?”

“I’ve seen it,” he said. “It’s clichéd.”

I rolled my eyes. “It’s supposed to be clichéd. That’s the joke.”

“It’s clichéd even for that particular style of joke.”

“You don’t understand what she did for me.”

 

Louis didn’t even miss a beat. “I do,” he said. “At least the part of it at Saint Elizabeth’s. Because I was there, if you’ll remember that, if you would once remember that in your recollection of events. Months, Lestat. I was there for months, with you, every night, while you recovered from god knows what. Naturally, she and I spent a good deal of time together. I would, perhaps, even tentatively describe us as close, if it is possible for anyone to be close with your mother. But of course, that hasn’t entered your analysis since if you don’t see it, it obviously didn’t happen.”

“Then you don’t know what she did for me when I was young.”

“I do, unless what’s in your book isn’t true.”

“Of course it’s true. But reading it in a book isn’t the…”

“I know what she did for you in the eighties, too. Again, I was there. I was there for all of it. And I thank her. As I say, I have nothing especially against Gabrielle.”

“So, what, Louis? So you know everything? Good for you!”

 

I wondered if the way he responded were strategy. Sometimes, some of the things he said made me think it was strategy. His hands were folded in his lap, and that seemed strategic. Strategically annoying. Especially when he spoke.

“I don’t know everything, and I’m not claiming to.”

“Why, then, are you being such a stubborn, goddamned bastard about it? Why must you continue talking about things that you clearly do not understand?”

“I understand _you_ , and better than you think I do.”

“No, you don’t. You just think you do, and it is _pissing me the fuck off God help me, Louis_. Gabrielle is my _mother_. She’s my _mother_. Can’t you call up some of that Southern gentility of yours and appreciate that insulting my mother is not only inaccurate, it is frankly impolite.”

 

I suspect I’d got him with that one. Impropriety in manners is his least favorite thing, perhaps even more so than lazy scholarship. I saw him recalibrate, lower his voice, strip it of tone.

“I’m not trying to insult her. I’d never do that, and I’m sorry if you think I am. It’s simply something that requires address, can’t you see that?”

“Why?”

“Because there are complicated facets to that relationship, aren’t there? Shouldn’t you at least try to think about them?”  

“Why?”

“Because what if it does affect you?”

“Why would it?”

“Because it’s in contemplation that we…”

I wouldn’t even let him finish that one. I was too caught up in my petty game by now. “But really, why?”

 

It backfired. “Because it’s not good for you to have sex with your own mother!” he shouted. “It’s not good for anybody! I don’t care what kind of rationale you have for it!”

 

His obvious embarrassment at shouting loudly about something as indecorous as incest was almost funny enough to make me laugh at him, but the circumstances did sort of ruin it. Still, in the absolute silence that followed his outburst, he seemed to realize what he’d said, and he flushed wildly. That was enough for me to forgive him, just a little. “We didn’t have sex,” I said, quietly.

Louis raised one eyebrow at me. Incredulously. He held my gaze until I broke it by looking back at the road. I might have flushed myself.

“Creatures of the night,” I said, “we’re…”

 

I was trying not to look at him, but I couldn’t avoid his face in my periphery. I had flushed, too. I could feel it. Mon Dieu, how fucking embarrassing. How pedestrian, how banal that I should blush. “I’m grown man, Louis. I made my own decisions.”

“Twenty-one years of age is hardly a grown man.”

“I was grown enough for you!” I snapped. Unless the point is that I wasn’t, I thought to say, and that’s why I was. Almost did, in fact. Thank God he couldn’t read my thoughts just then.

“Yes,” he said. “But that’s hardly the point, is it?”

“You were the same age as me when you took over Pointe du Lac! Or close enough. Twenty-one is old enough!”

 

He seemed to ignore that. He didn’t say anything, anyway. “It is,” I repeated.

“I’m sure I don’t care.”

Then, he didn’t even have to read my thoughts after all. Because I told them. “It’s not your business to care! And don’t you think it is someowhat hypocritical of you, being judgmental about what a parent and a child do together when they are al…”

“Shut your mouth this instant,” Louis said. “That’s your only warning. If you say anything else about Claudia and I, I will not hesitate in breaking your jaw.”

 

I felt a rush of blood shoot through me at that. Tasted it. I thought I could smell it on him too. Unusual that he’d said her name, too. Incendiary. “Only my jaw?”

He didn’t answer. Just looked at me.

“You couldn’t anyway.”

He didn’t answer that either.

“Shut up about my mother then.”

Or that. 

“I’m not fucked up about it,” I said. “It was perfectly healthy.”

 

He had evidently retreated into total silence, even turning away from me. He wasn’t looking at me at me anymore anyway, and despite the fact that I’d asked him to do it, that it should have been a blessed relief, it agitated me. This man is an island, I thought again. This fucking man. I concentrated on the road again, but I didn’t really.

“I’m not,” I said again. “It was.”

“Do you want me to answer you?” Louis asked me, and I said nothing. I did, obviously, but I wasn’t going to admit it. He sighed. Then he turned to look at me again. I felt my shoulders tense, felt the leather of the wheel through the leather of my driving gloves. Mon Dieu, but he can stare when he wants to. He can really stare.  
  
“Fine,” he said. “I think you’re fucked up about it.”

 

He said it angrily. At first, that seemed almost as necessary to correct as the fact that he’d said it at all. But as he continued to speak, he leveled his voice, evenly, as if he was planeing it down in a smooth stroke. By the end it was quiet again, and perfectly even. “I think you were very, very vulnerable, and it was the worst possible time that it could have happened, considering. I have some respect for Gabrielle, and even some genuine affection for her, but _you_ , I think, are angry with her, and I think you deserve to be.”

 

I might have marveled at the gentility in that, if I hadn’t hated him. I couldn’t look at him. He looked at me, though. I could feel it. “I wish you wouldn’t swear,” I said. “It doesn’t become you.”

Louis said nothing to that. He only continued to look at me.

“I’m not angry,” I told him.

“Yes,” he said, “you are.”

“You can’t just expect people to change who they are for you!” I protested. “If I could, wouldn’t you have?”

Nothing.

“She stayed with me as long as she could! She loved me, and she…”

“She what?”

“At least we were always honest with each other. She even told me what a pain it was, giving birth, raising children.”

“How truly thoughtful of her.”

“Shut up.”

“Alright,” Louis said. “I’ll shut up.”

It wasn’t alright though, and I knew it. “You’re just parroting the therapist now, Louis. Come on.”

 

Louis gave another sigh, and it did make me angry, but it was the kind of anger that was so balanced on possibility that it felt thrilling more than anything else. All that tame sex, I realized. All that tenderness. I could shatter it, if I chose to. And I might just do it. I might just. “You don’t really agree with him,” I said.

“I believe _you_ agree with him, and I think,” he said, and it sounded careful. He paused. “I think it might behoove you to begin using an accurate word for what happened to you.”

“Don’t you put some tawdry word on it. I told you to shut up.”

“I don’t mean your mother, Lestat. I mean before that.”

 

I felt a jolt. I felt nausea. I felt such thundering nausea I almost lost my grip on the wheel. Almost instantly, there was a wall of liquid behind my eyes, loud and painful. But it wasn’t tears. It was something much worse than that. It burned me. “Shut up!” I yelled. It seemed to come from nowhere. I knew it was wrong, I knew it was out of proportion. I couldn’t stop it.

  
And it must have been louder than I’d though it had. Louis didn’t only flinch, he seemed to jump. Eyes wide again, breathing in. I’d have been satisfied by that, usually. Fear in his face. He was speaking. I think he was trying to apologize. 

I wasn’t listening. “Dammit, don’t! I’m driving! I hate both of you so much! You and that fucking therapist! Why do you make me do this?”

“Lestat,” he said.

“Was it rape when it happened to you? Was it? You don’t know _anything_! Mon Dieu, it’s fucking _infuriating_! Fuck!”

“Lestat,” he said, again.

“ _Why_ would you bring that up now? _Why_? I am driving and we are fighting and God fucking damn you, Louis! Damn you to Hell!”

“You’re right,” he said, “Of course you’re right. I should have known better than to bring that up now. I am sorry.”

 

He did actually sound it, though I did not, and would not forgive him for it under the circumstances. “Not now and not ever!” I yelled. “I don’t ever want to talk about that! Nobody in their right mind ever wants to talk about that!”

  
I wished I hadn’t set him up with a straight line like that. He didn’t say it, he was far too married to his moral high ground, but I knew he was thinking it. I could practically hear it: _you’re not in your right mind_. So I continued to yell over it. “She was good to me! She helped me _forget_! She’s not like you, dredging up everything in order to make me feel it, in order to make me wallow in it, making me suffer through this interminable process of misery and self-degradation. _God_! I hate you!”

“Calm down,” he said. “Lestat, please, calm down. You’re not paying attention to the road.”

  
I wasn’t paying attention to him either. “Because you did! Because that was you who made me say it, about… all of that. I was fine! I am just fine being a vampire and I’m glad it happened to me and I am _just fine_!”

“I want you to pull over. You’ll hurt someone.”

“GOOD! I’M A GODDAMNED FUCKING VAMPIRE, LOUIS! I LIKE HURTING PEOPLE!”

  
Abruptly, moving like a flash of light, Louis reached across me and turned the wheel in the direction of the verge. We swerved, but I was too strong for him to really take control. I shoved him hard, with my elbow, and he fell back into his seat, winded, or ostensibly winded despite the fact that it meant nothing for him to be winded because he couldn’t honestly suffer from lack of breath. He couldn’t possibly be really hurt. He shouldn’t perform as if he was. But his eyes were wide, fearful, horrified, and he let out a noise – a whimper? A whine? I couldn’t tell what it was, only that it was low pitched, and eerie.

  
I turned back to the road, fuming. Or fuming in my body. My body, which I occupied only negligibly.

“Please,” he said. “Please, god, pull over.”

  
I don’t know why I acceded. Perhaps I was sorry. Perhaps I’d made my point and was satisfied. Perhaps it was a self-preservation instinct of some kind. I did, though. I turned the car off the road, over the verge and up onto a patch of concrete. One of those ubiquitous nowheres, between houses and buildings, that stretches of city road will always have in a town where history happens, where wars and hurricanes come. A parking space, a vacant lot. I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t care.

  
How could I care about this? Everything was grey and dark and shot through with orange streetlights, and how stupid that seemed. How stupid the sound of cooling metal. How stupid the sound of Louis’ panicked exclamations. I couldn’t hear what they were. No, that isn’t right. I probably could have. I just didn’t care enough about him to concentrate. I didn’t care about any of this. I hadn’t even realized I that I was shaking, that my hands trembled, stiffly even as I dug them into the steering wheel to make them stop. I could hear the sound of my own useless breathing, clear, limitless, and the feeling of it so automatic, but I didn’t care about that either. Out of my body again, I thought, hilariously. Somewhere impossible, I’ve entered orbit.

  
When I curved back in, when I made impact on re-entry, there was nothing. Just nothingness, and the searing sound of total oblivion. Just like fucking. Like death and like fucking. And then Louis was speaking again. As he’d been speaking all along.  “Can you hear me?” he said. “Can you hear my voice?”

  
I didn’t know how long he’d been saying it. He seemed firm, but not panicked, so it couldn’t have been long enough to really count.

“Yes, of course I can,” I snapped. “Why would you ask me that?” Since, you know, I didn’t say, I can hear you now.

  
But I don’t know if Louis knew about my lie of omission either. He didn’t say anything about it if he did. He let it drop. Inwardly, I thanked him for that small kindness. Only inwardly though. Not outwardly. His hand touched mine, and I threw it off. “Don’t you fucking dare!”

  
Louis folded the hand over his other, sighing once again.  It angered me. Of course it did. The sigh, and the composure. Hadn’t I been trying to frighten him? Was that what I’d been doing? Anyway, it hadn’t worked. “I was managing!” I shouted. “That was you, doing that! How dare you dredge that up?”

He said nothing.

“Just _fuck_ you! That isn’t fair!”

Still nothing.

“And do you know what, she _is_ like you, reading all the time and not caring what it does to me!”

  
Nothing to that either. Only a long, long pause. Then another sigh, during which, for the second it lasted, I saw myself tearing the skin from his face. God only knows how I didn’t do it. Perhaps I did. Perhaps everything after this moment is purely imagined fiction.

  
Then finally, Louis said, “I’ve certainly read your books.”

“Yes, I know!” I shouted. “Why do you keep telling me that?”

“Because sometimes I don’t think you have.”

“Of course I’ve read my own books!”

“Really?” he asked me. “Have you really ever sat down and read all of your books, from start to finish? Even one of them?”  
“I suppose you’ve read _Interview with the Vampire_.”

“Yes, of course I have. My name is on it.”

“And of course I’ve read mine!”

  
There was another lengthy pause, during which he seemed to be thinking about something. Then I found out what it was. And I wished I hadn’t. “Do you remember when you said you wanted to write about your sexual hang-ups?”

“No.”

“We were talking about Woody Allen, I think. And you said…”

“Alright, I remember now. I was joking.” Sort of joking.

“And I said that I thought you already had been.”

“And I told you that I don’t like it when you analyze me.  _And that is still true._ ”

“You don’t like intimacy,” he said. “No, that isn’t right, you do like it. You just like it on your terms. And I have some sympathy for that, given the context you’ve come from.”

“Oh, so now this is about my childhood,” I drawled, as sarcastically as I knew how. Louis ignored me.

“In _The Vampire Lestat_ ,” he said. “You’re looking at Gabrielle’s breasts, and I thought – do you want to know what I thought?”

  
The sensation at his words was curiously horrible. Crawling. Don’t talk about my mother’s breasts, I wanted to say. No-one should talk about my mother’s breasts but me.  “Not particularly, no,” I said, deadpan. I could feel my composure returning. Somewhat.

  
Louis’ expression was unsettling, though. “I wished you weren’t in that situation,” he said. “I did, that was all I could think. I wished I’d known you then, or known about it. I wished I’d been able to do something for you, even if it was only to listen.”

“It wouldn’t have done any good if you had. Our relationship wasn’t like that anyway. And besides, it was perfectly healthy, didn’t I… ”

“I killed your father,” he said. “I killed him because you couldn’t.”

  
I don’t know what I’d been about to say, but whatever it had been, his words made me stop. Because I remembered it. Because he had done that, and because there was a tenderness in that action. Because killing is a kind of love for us. Violence is a kind of love. I wanted to be sick again. It’s the worst thing about being a vampire, worse even than not being able to fuck properly; not being able to vomit sensations like these out of you.

  
Still. I could, I suppose, approximate the action with words. “Are you offering to kill my mother, Louis?” I said. “Is this some sort of two-for-one deal, a patricide with a matricide thrown in as a sort of… parricide digestif? Do you realize how _utterly insane_ _that is_ , Louis?”

“No, I’m not… I have no desire to… why won’t you understand that I…”

“You couldn’t anyway. She’d destroy you.”

  
I moved to turn the ignition, but Louis put his hand over mine. Dangerous. Didn’t he know how dangerous that was? Didn’t he know what could happen? “What, Louis?” I said, carefully. “What are you doing?”

“You shouldn’t drive.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not at all. You only don’t know how to stop yourself from being a compulsive control freak.” 

“Do you know?” I asked him, in a low hiss, “do you know how much trouble you are in?”

“Be quiet,” he said. “I mean it, just stop. I’m sorry I’ve brought this up now, but it’s come up, and you’ll listen to me. Having a sexual relationship with your mother, and having one almost immediately after somebody, a stranger, had raped you. That’s a very hard hand to be dealt, and I’m sorry.”

“Don’t say that word.”

“The word you actually use for it in _Blood Canticle_?”

“Don’t talk about _Blood Canticle_. It’s a terrible book, alright? Fine, it’s terrible. I’m a terrible writer and I don’t know what I’m writing, and… and…”

“Get out, would you? And let me drive.”

I shook off his hand. Started the car. “Fuck you,” I said. “Fuck you to Hell. Stop talking about my mother, and stop talking about… that other thing, you utter, utter fucking cunt.”

  
He didn’t even seem flustered by that. Stop all of this forcefulness especially, I wanted to say. I really wanted to say that. It wasn’t even analysis. It was something else and I didn’t want him to do it, and I wanted to tell him so. I would have been utterly pathetic though, and I didn’t. I settled for this: “Mon Dieu, but you’re infuriating.”

  
Could he even hear what I’d said to him? It didn’t seem so. “I just wished you’d told me. When you write, it’s like you put it at arm’s length. It’s a way of getting it away from you. You won’t… and then… I think you want to put me through that again.”

I put my foot on the pedal, and the Porsche spurted forward. An embarrassing mistake. But I corrected myself seamlessly, slid it into reverse, backed out of our impromptu park. He wouldn’t have noticed, surely. “Let’s not talk about putting each other through things. You’re the one who tried to kill himself.”

“I’m not _the one_. You just didn’t manage it.”

“Louis!” I said. “Completely different. I’d never have managed it. You might have… you really might have died. You want me to trust you with these things, but how can I? You’re not exactly the world’ most reliable confidant.”

  
“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said, angrily, but it did, he just wouldn’t see it.

“And if we’re talking about books, then what the fuck was _Interview with the Vampire_.”

“I thought you were dead.”

“You wished I was dead.”

“Lestat!” he said, appalled. But he didn’t, I notice, deny it. That was all the fuel I needed.

“And why didn’t you kill yourself before, if you were so desperate to? You were weak for two hundred years, you could have done it. I don’t think you’ve ever felt it at all. I think you’re a manipulative, vicious little creature who has no other design to your performative melancholia but making me feel guilty. I think you let me do what I’ve done to you for no other reason but to torture me with your insinuations for the rest of fucking eternity.”

  
I saw it wound him, but I also saw him recover. Blind fury at that. That was a killing blow! I should have yelled at him. Go down! Go down where I’ve put you!

“I didn’t let you,” he said. Quietly.

  
No, not blind. No, I could see the road still. “You did,” I said. “I remember. I remember your words. I remember your tender sighs and your absolute acquiescence. Oh, it was beautiful! And thank God for fucking David, writing it all down so that the soap opera wouldn’t be over. I can read it over and over again and suckle myself to sleep.”

 

That he wouldn’t be goaded by my deliberate vulgarity simmered at me like boiling water. See the road, I told myself. Just see the road for itself and drive on it and don’t leave your body again. Don’t let him be right.

“David had his own reasons for writing that,” Louis said, and I almost couldn’t.  

“It’s the truth, Louis. I was fucking there, as you were so fond of saying earlier. And oh! An inadvertent pun! I was _fucking there_.”

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Maybe later.”

 

I turned a corner, and we were on our home street. I could see the flat in the distance, shimmering in and out of my field of vision. Some of it trees, some of it blank rage. Most of it trees, I told myself. Keep driving. It was easier since I realized I might have got him with that last comment. He’d turned away again. I couldn’t see his face now, but his posture was obvious. Disgust. Good.

“I wanted to die,” he said. “I was trying to die.”

“You were not,” I responded. “You don’t have genuine feelings. You’re just a tragic, self-aggrandizing wet blanket who must occasionally make up a little drama. No wonder you love this therapy crap so much. It gives meaning to your otherwise dreary, pedestrian existence. Oh! Home sweet home.”

 

I delivered that line with calm, perfect, triumphant sarcasm. I had turned into the driveway the winner. I pulled into my park with flourish, and turned the ignition off. He wouldn’t look at me while getting out of the car, but I didn’t much care. All I had to do was wait for him to close his door so I could lock it, and he did, and I did. I walked to the flat ahead of him, receiving the dog as I opened the door. So he’d come to me this time, I thought. Good for him. Good for Mojo to be so obedient when I was so clear, so angry. That was sensible.

 

When Louis entered, when he turned back from closing the door, I saw he was crying again. He didn’t even bother to hide it. He’d taken a handkerchief from his pocket and was fixing it, but it didn’t seem to be helping. Irritating. That kind of weakness was irritating.

“What are you crying for?” I snapped at him. “Haven’t you cried enough today?”

“I’m just tired,” he said. “I’m tired because of therapy, and because of that argument.”

“You’re not allowed to do this. It’s my mother you’re talking about, and it’s not fair for you to try to manipulate your way out of it. If I deserve to be angry with anyone, it’s you, and you’ve got absolutely no reason to cry, except for the fact that you don’t like how wrong you were.”

 

Louis looked up from his handkerchief then. I expected to see a look of misery, of weakness, some supplication through which I expected he was planning to elicit tenderness. But I saw nothing of the kind. His expression was withering. It was a look of pure disdain, if not actual disgust. And then I remembered what else we’d talked about. Well, fuck him.

“I won’t bother to ask you to apologize to me for that,” Louis said. “Just go on about your business, I have reading to do anyway.”

 

At first I just glared at him, but his gaze was steady even though his eyes were red and wet. “Of course you do,” I snapped, and that was all he needed, apparently. He turned on his heel and left the room. I should have followed him straight away, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. For a moment or two, I stood there, looking at the space he had been, and then I stalked to the sofa and turned on the television.

 

It wasn’t a sitcom. That would have been narratively perfect, so I wish now that it had been, but it wasn’t, and at the time I didn’t think to look for one. I’m sure that shocks you, that I wouldn’t have thought about that, or that I’m not lying about it, since I do so excel at pointed, narrative gestures. And I do, I know. It’s just fighting, though, fighting when you know you are wrong, it takes more energy than I had. I actually forget what the show was. I wasn’t really watching it anyway. The dog crawled up beside me, or tried to (I had to help him get up on the sofa) and I petted him absently, but mostly I was thinking. I do remember that. I didn’t mean to think. That’s why I put on the television, to have somebody do my thinking for me.

 

That sounds stupid to say, but I mean it truly. I’d intended just to blot out the noise of Louis, enough to recover from what I knew had happened (I knew, even if I wouldn’t admit it). My hands still shook a little, the room still shook in and out of focus, I still heard ringing, static, barely audible whispers. I meant to quiet it. I peeled off my gloves to pet the dog properly and stared at the screen. I felt the rigidity in my body, felt how tense I was, tried to concentrate on something else. And I did. Just not television. Something else entirely.

 

I don’t know what made me think of it. This had been when Claudia was still genuinely young. Perhaps eight or nine – she’d been ours for a short time anyway, a matter of a few years. And she had been playing with dolls, making them talk to each other and I had joined in. I’d taken a doll of my own and put on a silly voice and made it talk to her two. But I’d distorted the game. I’d made it say ridiculous things, as if I were trying to rattle her out of it. I suppose it was an early feminism, in a way – why shouldn’t they go on wild adventures, or slight those who had wronged them? Why shouldn’t they be brave and strong, and answer to nobody? I did think of Gabrielle, I think, though not strongly. A part of me pushed that down, the memory of the things my mother had said to me about having a child, and hating it. Because I didn’t hate it. I liked it very much.

 

At first Claudia had been indignant at this. Her dolls were fashionable ladies, they had balls to attend. But then she had caught the spirit and our gambits had become increasingly ridiculous. Why shouldn’t they fly, I’d said, and we’d lifted them a little. At this point, or somewhere near it, Louis had joined us, coaxed either by Claudia or by myself, and it had made him smile. I had thrust a doll upon him and insisted he play a part also (we were spoiled for dolls. There were always an abundance). Louis had done his ridiculous lady’s voice, his Juliet-Portia, and later, 200 years away, his Tracey from _Manhattan_. Claudia had laughed as if she were quite gone mad. Louis had snickered a little, but attempted to keep the voice aloft throughout. I caught his eye, and his smile broadened, and then suddenly, he leaned towards me and kissed my mouth.

 

It was a soft kiss, and his own mouth was mostly closed, but it was infinitely sweet, and when his lips left mine, and I opened my eyes, I realized I’d been holding my breath while he did it. He smiled once more, but his gaze was gone from mine now. His eyes were back upon Claudia’s golden head, his hand lightly and propitiously upon her back, and I sat there in the afterglow of that short moment, stalled. I had resumed the game shortly afterwards, but something had happened. He hadn’t become my lover, that had happened already. This was something else entirely. Something much, much more important. 

 

I don’t know how long I thought about this. I seemed to remember every instant of it. Every detail of our clothing, every scent, every flicker of light in the room. It seemed as if I was there. Such drama, my life, almost as beautiful as television. Almost, in odd, rare moments, as reassuring. Until you remember everything that happened afterwards.

 

And I did. Or at least, I knew that I could have, and that brought me out of it. Or maybe that brought me out of it. It was also a possibility that that had happened because of Louis, who was standing now in one of the doorframes into the sitting room, leaned against it with folded arms. I don’t know how long he’d been watching me.

“What?” I snapped, when I noticed him. I didn’t exactly mean to snap, it just disoriented me. His fault. But he said nothing.

 

“I’m not going to apologize,” I said, but he didn’t answer that either. With the cardigan over his fingertips like that, he reminded me of how he’d looked in the old days, wearing a cape, when he’d pulled it around him to put out the cold. His slim-legged jeans were almost like breeches too. But it was a fleeting image, and it was gone by the time I blinked. I should get him some boots, I thought.

“Listen, it’s not my forte,” I said. “Take pity on me won’t you?”

Louis regarded me silently for a moment or two more before he spoke. “I have already,” he said. “A lot has been said, and I’m sure you’re as tired as I am. Let’s take pity on each other in general, shall we?”

“Why don’t you come over?”

“I’m not sure. Probably, I’m not used to being able to resolve a disagreement being so easily. I’m waiting for the second part.”

“You’re waiting for the catch,” I said.

“Yes.”

“There’s no catch, Louis. None at all.”

  
Louis sighed briefly, but I kept my eyes on his, imploring him as steadily as I knew how. Then he crossed the room and sat down next to me. His arms were still folded.

“I have forgiven you,” he said. “Of course I have.”

“Thank you so much for that.”

“I’ll rescind if you’re defensive. I mean it. It’s conditional. I’m exhausted and I don’t want to fight with you anymore. You may choose to accept the conditions, or I’ll go to bed by myself and we can discuss it tomorrow.”

  
His mouth, I noticed, was set in a very firm line. His resolve was adorable, and I found myself smiling at it, though I tried not to let on as I anticipated it would make him angry. “What conditions?”

“You’re already agreed. That there’s no catch.”

“There isn’t a catch,” I said. “You’re the catch. You’re a catch.”

Louis’ eyes flashed, but he said nothing.

I said, “I really love you, you know.”

 

“You’ve said that a lot tonight,” Louis said. He wanted to sound firm, I think, but really he sounded a little smug. I let him get away with it, under the circumstances.

“Maybe I feel it a lot.”

 

He smiled at that, briefly. This action was unmistakably smug, though he wouldn’t look at me to confirm it. Little monster, I thought. “It’s not something you can say to get out of an argument,” he told me.

“Conditions,” I said, once. And he looked up at me.

“I’m sorry.”

  
I looked at him closely when he said that. The smugness was gone now, and he let me examine him. After a moment, I leaned up and kissed him on the corner of his mouth.

“You taste of cigarettes,” he said.

“Would you shut up about that?”

“But you do. You might not be smoking them properly, but I can still taste it.”

“Sometimes, petit,” I said, “you are like a girl in a French movie. When you’re bold and firm like that, and you make such aesthetic demands of me. It’s a nineteen sixties movie, and look, you’re already in black and white.”

“You weren’t here during the sixties.”

“I know,” I said. “I watch films. Why don’t we watch a film? I’ve still got _Annie Hall_.”

“Alright,” Louis said. A trace of weariness in his voice. The merest indication of the fact that he was _letting me_.

“I’ve got to take the dog out first, though.”

“Let me get my things.”

“No, don’t come, chéri. You’re tired. Unless you’re hungry.”

 

I felt movement of his fingers against my hand. He’d put his cardiganed fingers over mine, and I appreciated the touch very much. However, I found I could not stop myself from reaching over with my other hand and turning the sleeve up so that his own white one was visible. But he didn’t seem to notice that, or else he did and forgave me. Either was acceptable. I drew a circle on his hand with my finger. He let me do that too.

 “No, it’s alright.”

“I won’t be very long.”

“Mmm,” he said. He looked worried, troubled. He bit his lip. I watched him, but he didn’t say anything else. Instead, after a moment, he laid his head against mine. I hadn’t expected that. Nor had I realized I’d been waiting for it. But I felt something at it just the same. I don’t know what exactly. Something quiet.

“Don’t you want me to go, darling?”

“No,” he said, very softly.

 

I let myself hear that for a moment, closing my eyes. There were movements in that darkness, but for once, they seemed very far away.

“Why not?”

“I just don’t want you to,” he said. “Why can’t you ever take anything at face value?”

 

It made me laugh. I don’t know if it was the petulance or the predictability, but it was one of those two things. And it was a strange laughter, more fondness than derision, more because the sensation inside of me was too sweet, and too filling, and it had to come out of me somehow. “I don’t know,” I told him. “It’s a character flaw, I guess.”

“What is this crap you’re watching?”

“Shut up,” I said, still laughing. “Let me go.”

He did.

 

By the time the dog and I returned, the television was off and Louis was asleep. He’s always had a knack for sleeping, and I wasn’t lying when I told you that. This kind of sleeping is special too; different from the way we sleep in the day. He looked human, breathing softly on the sofa, his mouth slightly open and his baggy cardigan seeming a comfortable accessory in this context, and so I forgave it for being slovenly. He had his hands folded over a copy of _An Inconvenient Truth_ , open on his chest, and the ‘phone didn’t seem to disturb him when it rang.

 

I snatched it from its cradle anyway. For a moment I didn’t recognize the voice. I never do. I didn’t even notice I was speaking French again.

“What is Mobile like?” my mother said, after niceties.  

“Foggy,” I said. “I don’t know. It’s like a small, much less romantic New Orleans.”

“Oh, yes?”

“It has its own character. I don’t know. It’s Alabama. It’s Alabaman.”

 

I heard the crackle of distance in Gabrielle’s pause. Was she on a cellphone? If so, it wouldn’t have been hers. I wondered who she’d taken it from.

“That’s not why I… Gabrielle, I’m here because Louis is here.”

“Louis?” she said, but I couldn’t get much from her tone either. They’re so alike, I thought, alike in such curious ways.

“Yeah,” I said.

“How is Louis?”

 

On the sofa, Louis’ eyelids fluttered. I wondered if he could hear me, and I wondered if he was dreaming about the end of the world.

“He’s fine.”

“And how are you?”

“I’m fine,” I said. It took me a long time to say the next thing, but I did say it. “I’d like to see you.”

I thought her voice sounded as if she were smiling. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I’m looking forward to it too.”

 

I closed my eyes. My back was to Louis at this point and I was thankful for that. Even if he was asleep. I didn’t know what would be on my face. I didn’t know if he’d be able to hear it in my breathing. “Alright,” I said, to Gabrielle. “And you’ll stay here?”

“If that’s alright with you.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s alright with me.”

“Good,” she said. And then, just like that, she was gone.

 

I stood holding the ‘phone in the corner of the sitting room for a second or two. How had she gotten my Mobile number in the first instance? I wanted to know. Except no, no she had answered that already. Blackwood, she said, the last time we spoke. She’d spoken to Quinn. I only hadn’t wanted to remember because of what else she’d probably have learned from that conversation. But I pushed that aside too. Louis was right. I was too damned tired.   

 

So, after replacing the ‘phone in its cradle, I crawled up next to him on the sofa, slipped his book out of his hands, and placed it on the floor. That did make him stir, but I put my arm around him, and he curled into me, snaking his arm about my waist without opening his eyes. “Mmm?” he said, and I don’t think he’d woken entirely. I kissed him, repositioning myself so that I could reach the remote for the television. “Ssh, darling. Go back to sleep.”

“Did someone call?”

 

I put the television on. He still hadn’t opened his eyes, and I thought how sweet it was that he was content to listen there, nose in my collarbone, his hand clutched at my waist as if I were anchoring him. As if we were pulling each other into the ether, resetting, a record player’s needle returning to home. His lashes were long, dark.

“My mother called,” I told him. “She’ll be here tomorrow.”

 


End file.
